DS Interview: Mike Felumlee and Stephanie Wysocki On Building Community With The Punk Rock Pinball Association

As punk rock has evolved over the last thirty years, its influence has bled far beyond music. Punk rock’s DIY, community-driven spirit has found its way into academic, arts, sports, and countless other corners of life. Punk rock has always been about connection. While shows have been the traditional way of bringing people together, Mike Felumlee (Smoking Popes) and his wife, Stephanie Wysocki have found a different way to build a scene by forming the Punk Rock Pinball Association.

Their goal is to help grow competitive pinball by making it fun for beginner and mid-level players, not just pros, while also helping members build new friendships. As you’ll read below, Mike and Stephanie are looking to expand the Punk Rock Pinball Association into new communities. If you’re interested in starting up a group in your own scene, stick around until the end of the interview for links and details on how to become a Scene Rep.

Dying Scene (Forrest Gaddis): Thank you very much for this interview. I had actually seen the Facebook group first. I’m not even in the area. I thought it was a group where people go and talk about pinball. I actually just joined a league myself out this way.

Mike Felumlee: Oh, cool.

My wife and I are a few weeks into it. I always wanted to try it, but scheduling wise it didn’t work out. Now that my littles aren’t little anymore, my wife and I can go and do this like once a week. 

Stephanie Wysocki: Well, I’m glad to hear that you’re doing a league. How’s the league going?

It’s been good so far. I’m doing okay. It’s been years since I’ve played this much pinball. If I’m at an arcade, I always jump on a machine. I just haven’t played this much consistent pinball in years.

Stephanie Wysocki: That’s super cool. You’re the exact type of person who Mike and I started the podcast and Facebook group. As people’s kids get older and leave the house, and you’re kind of in this new stage of life, pinball is a really great thing to do with your partner or by yourself. If you’re just looking to meet new friends, we’ve found that pinball people are just a really welcoming bunch. You also tap into like-minded people and even people who aren’t like-minded. It’s a really cool way to engage with humans again. I feel like there’s a lack of that these days.

Mike and I moved down to Central Illinois, and we tried really hard to find our people or just some friends. It’s hard as adults, and we tried all kinds of weird things. When the Jaws pinball machine came out a couple of years ago, it’s my favorite movie. We’d been saying for years, “If there’s ever a Jaws pinball, we’re getting it.” So we did. It just basically opened up this whole new world of friendly, competitive pinball that we didn’t know existed. In the best way possible, it kind of changed our lives.

Mike Felumlee: Yeah, it’s kind of become our lives because we just started our Punk Rock Pinball HQ, which is like a club here in Bloomington. We have like twelve or thirteen of ours over there.

Stephanie Wysocki: We kind of started this collective, basically. It’s a bunch of our pinball friends. We’ve all contributed games to this space, and it’s our club/training facility. We all want to go to state next year. We host tournaments and leagues, and it’s kind of like a member, what do you call it?

Mike Felumlee: It’s like a private club where you have to be a member to enter. We have a monthly tournament where you can pay for a one-day membership to play. We’ve got a weekly league that’s all members. Six of us have keys. We have a Discord where we’ll post, “Hey, we’re going to be there tonight from like five to seven.” Then other people will show up and play together. So yeah, that’s been really fun. We started that at the end of November.

How did you get into pinball?

Stephanie Wysocki: Growing up, going to arcades or hanging out in small rock venues, there were always pinball machines around. And who doesn’t love pinball? The nostalgia of it was super strong for us. So, like I said, when Jaws came out, we got it. We also discovered that there was a bar here in Bloomington that had a handful of pinball machines and they were doing weekly tournaments.

I was really intimidated to go play a pinball tournament. Like, who am I to do this? I’m not a professional and don’t really practice. Mike and I went with low expectations, and we met some really awesome people. We started going every week and every month. Then we started going to other towns around here and joining other tournaments that were happening, and just really got bit hard by the pinball bug.

It’s that feeling of playing a game and knowing that you can do better. You just want to hit start again, but we weren’t good when we started. It wasn’t a huge group of people playing, maybe around ten, twelve people. We were at the bottom a lot. Mike is super competitive. I didn’t know that I had such a competitive spirit in myself as well, but I do.

We just kept going back for more. The cool thing about pinball, anywhere you meet friends, is no one’s going to let you win. So when you do beat somebody, it feels really good. You accomplished it because you fought hard and hit all the right shots.

My wife has social anxiety. The first week in the league, we were in the same group. Then later, she realized we wouldn’t be in the same group the next time. She did okay by herself. I was proud that she was able to come out of her shell a bit and play with other people.

Stephanie Wysocki: That’s very cool. I feel like 98% of the people you come in contact with playing pinball are super friendly. They will help you out. They’ll tell you what you’re trying to do. To know what you have to do is one thing, but to execute it is a totally different thing. 

Mike Felumlee: I think pinball tournaments or leagues are really good for people with social anxiety because it gives you something to talk about. I have some social anxiety meeting new people. If you’re just out to dinner, what the hell do you talk about? If you’re in a pinball league, you can say, “Oh, what am I trying to do on this game?”

Now you’re talking about what you’re trying to do in the game. It’s a pretty easy way to interact with people, even if you’re introverted or have anxieties. It gives you common ground with this person you don’t know. We’re both trying to figure out what shots we’re trying to make in this game to score points.

As I’ve been playing more, I’ve found games that I’m better at than others. I prefer this machine over that machine. Rather than saying, “Oh, look, it’s Batman or The Simpsons,” I now play machines even if I’m not completely into the theme at all.

Stephanie Wysocki: Oh my gosh, totally. Like the themes. I’m not a fan of the Foo Fighters, but that game is super fun. It’s a really, really fun game to play.

I’m the same with Metallica, not a fan. I played it the other day in a league and I ended up winning that game. Out of all the machines.

Mike Felumlee: We’re not Led Zeppelin fans. I’m starting to like them more because we have the pinball machine and we really like that one. Before we became crazy about pinball, I wouldn’t have considered a Led Zeppelin pinball machine in my house. Then we played it at a handful of places and got a really good deal on it. So, like, yeah, we like Led Zeppelin now, I guess.

Was there a specific moment that led you guys to create the Punk Rock Pinball Association, or was it just something that naturally evolved?

Mike Felumlee: I started the group because I had visions in my head. I was inspired by Punk Rock Bowling. Decades ago, when I was briefly in Alkaline Trio, I got to participate in the Punk Rock Bowling tournament. I was in their band and on that team. I thought it was really super fun and cool. So I thought, “What if we did a punk rock pinball thing?” 

I just started the group, and then we started doing the Punk Rock Pinball podcast, which is on our YouTube channel. I still want to do a big Punk Rock Pinball tournament that involves a lot of people in bands. It’s all people in bands and on record labels. You had Fat Wreck Chords there, and Epitaph, and a NOFX team, I think. That was my initial vision: let’s have a big thing where there’s a rock show and a pinball tournament with bands. I also wanted to have a leaderboard because of the ongoing leaderboard for the tournaments here. I’m like, why don’t we just do this where anybody in the country can sign up through our website, and they can host Punk Rock Pinball tournaments as well?

Hopefully, somebody in your area will start doing it. You can earn your punk rock pinball points and you can show up on our leaderboard. It’s just a fun way to see the history of how you’ve performed. Right now, it’s just a national leaderboard, but we’re going to break that down before too long, where we’ll have leaderboards for different areas. If you look at the IFPA, the International Flipper Pinball Association, the big sanctioning body of competitive pinball, they have statewide leaderboards and they have state championships in every state. I thought it would be cooler in a more punk way to do that more by scenes versus like a state. 

You know how in punk rock, Chicago was Chicago, but we had our northwest suburb scene, and there was a western suburb scene. It kind of makes it a little bit more local. In the future, there’ll probably be a Southern California punk rock pinball scene. You can see where you rank in Southern California and you don’t have to worry about anybody else in the state. If there’s multiple scenes, like if big stuff starts happening in San Diego, maybe you’ll have a San Diego scene and an Orange County scene.

I want to break it down pretty granular, like that. So all these little scenes can have their own kind of championships and stuff like that. Eventually, do like a national championship where we do have a couple of big punk bands and a hundred-plus players, hopefully. That’s like the ultimate pie-in-the-sky vision.

Do you have any bands that participate in tournaments out your way?

Stephanie Wysocki: In April, we’ve got a thing.

Mike Felumlee: We have the band Off With Their Heads coming down to play a show here in Bloomington. Ryan does all of our merch. He prints all the punk rock pinball merchandise. We’re going to have a tournament at our HQ where people can pay to get into the tournament, which gives them a ticket to the show. Then they also get to play pinball against Off With Their Heads in a tournament. Toys That Kill is also playing that show.

That’s a good lineup.

Mike Felumlee: We’ve recently hooked Deanna from Sincere Engineer. She’s now like an avid pinball player. We had her come down to be on the podcast, and she did a little music session on our YouTube. On the podcast, she’s like, “I don’t like pinball that much. I don’t get it.” Then we had her play some games at the house and we showed her some games. It was midway through our second game on Cactus Canyon when she’s like, “I get it.”

Stephanie Wysocki: She’s so cute because now I don’t know, let’s say September, maybe she went to Europe and toured a little bit. She was posting pictures in the Facebook group of her playing pinball in different places in Europe. They’re on tour right now. I think they’re in Florida. They’re stopping everywhere and playing pinball, which is so cool. The vision is like we want to bring more people into pinball, and having those bands is certainly a cool way of helping us do that.

Mike Felumlee: Do you know The Dopamines?

Yes.

Mike Felumlee: Yeah, their singer, Jon, just came out last weekend. We had a big monthly tournament. He came and stayed at our house and played. We had a double header. So, I’m guessing the first Punk Rock Pinball National Championship will probably have to include performances by Sincere Engineer, the Dopamines, and Off With Their Heads, for sure. I haven’t really gotten going with tournaments where it’s like all people in bands playing in a tournament. I could, but we haven’t had the penetration I want amongst people in bands.

I’ve started figuring out how to get more involvement there because I know there’s guys in the Jeff Rosenstock band that play. There’s guys in the band Pup that play a lot. I just don’t know those guys. So, somehow we’ve got to get some of those bands involved to make it more of a band thing about it. Most people playing Punk Rock Pinball Association tournaments are just regular pinball players. I would very much like to have a band-only division. We’re probably going to need a little help on the PR side of that to get more recruitment.

Stephanie Wysockyi: Mike has been working really hard on our website along with a fellow from the Kansas City pinball scene named Nick Greenup. Nick has been kind of the brains behind bringing a lot of these leaderboards and stuff to life based on Mike’s vision. They’ve collaborated on it. But if you go to punkrockpinball.com, there is a page in there about the association. It has all the information on how to become a scene rep or a tournament director. It’s all right there.

How do you determine what’s an approved venue? 

Mike Felumlee: If you go on the website, we do have guidelines if you’re hosting a Punk Rock Pinball Association event. It has to be open and inclusive to everyone. You can’t discriminate based on gender identity, race, sexual preference, or any of that. As long as it’s a safe and open space for everyone, then it’s pretty good with us. If we hear otherwise, we would yank that. There’s a link to a form on the website where anybody that wants to host an approved venue or tournament can fill out this form. It’s got some questions on there; they have to acknowledge that they’ve read and understand what our rules and guidelines are about. From there, once people fill out that form, I give them a login to the website, and then you’re free to go in and create your events, post them, submit your results, and get your people on the leaderboard.

You mentioned you’re trying to have this be like the Punk Rock Bowling of pinball, when you do the tournaments are you doing shows to coincide with the tournaments or is it just really just focusing on the pinball when you have your tournaments?

Mike Felumlee: The Punk Rock Pinball Association tournaments are mostly just pinball tournaments that would otherwise be IFPA sanctioned, or leagues are fine as well. You can also run an IFPA tournament with the Punk Rock Pinball Association at the same time, but we do have some gimmicks planned, like the event we’re doing with Off With Their Heads, which includes a tournament followed by a show. I play in the Smoking Popes, and we’re trying to do something in Arizona.

We’re playing at the Yucca Tap Room, which shares a space with the Electric Bat. It’s like our 35th-anniversary tour. During the day, there’ll be a Punk Rock Pinball tournament, and then at night, The Popes will have our show in the evening. So, wherever possible, I like to pair a Punk Rock Pinball tournament with a rock show. There aren’t a lot of venues or a lot of pinball places. They are usually at a brewery or an arcade. The Electric Bat happens to be the most ideal place.

It’s just awesome because there’s a huge opening, and you can see into the Electric Bat while you’re playing on the stage. You can see into the pinball area. There are two different businesses, but there’s a shared wall. It’s probably a fifteen-foot-wide doorway that’s just open so you can walk in and out between the Electric Bat and the Yucca Tap Room. For a punk rock show plus a pinball tournament, it’s probably the best place in the United States to have that happen.

What’s the hardest thing about running the Punk Rock Pinball Association?

Stephanie Wysocki: I would say there’s no roadmap for this. The IFPA is kind of like the MLB of pinball, and we’re really focused on fun, almost like a minor league to the IFPA. We’ve looked to them for some of the rules and how things are set up. They’ve been around for, I don’t know, I think a couple decades. They’ve been doing this for quite a while, but there’s no roadmap for this. We’re kind of figuring it out as we go and trying to be proactive in other ways regarding how we want to structure this and make it different. As far as challenges, I think it’s just that we don’t know what we don’t know, which is probably the biggest challenge; which is maybe not a challenge. Maybe that’s a positive, that we’re just kind of writing the rules as we go.

Mike Felumlee: I think as it gets bigger, a big challenge I foresee is that, for example, the IFPA has almost 200,000 players. We currently have about 500 players, and we’ve had about fifty tournaments in the last month and a half. We have about forty or fifty more scheduled, but if you look at the IFPA, there are probably 500 tournaments a day. This involves thousands of people from all different types of backgrounds who have all different types of expectations and needs. So inevitably, if enough of your tournaments happen, bad things might happen at one of them.

There was an IFPA event earlier in the year in North Carolina where some shit happened. Then you have to try to deal with that in a way that’s going to appease as many people as possible. I think we haven’t really had to deal with that yet, but I foresee that we will at some point. I think that’s going to probably be the hardest part, making tough decisions to please as many people in your community as you can, knowing that you’re not ever going to be able to please everybody. 

How do you differ from the IFPA in terms of rules?

Mike Felumlee: Our scoring format is much simpler. There are two big differentiators. For one, IFPA has very specific tournament formats that you’re allowed to run. For instance, there’s a format called Amazing Race, where everybody starts on one machine, and if you score the lowest on that machine, you’re out. You go to the next, and whoever scores the lowest on any specific machine is out of the deal. The IFPA has decided that for 2026, if you have an Amazing Race tournament, it’s not worth as many IFPA points as a match play tournament.

Like we’re getting into the nitty-gritty of like only shit that pinball people are going to understand here. There are some really fun formats that the IFPA, for maybe justifiable reasons, kind of nerfed the scoring. Whereas with the Punk Rock Pinball tournament, the scoring is entirely based on how many people are playing in the event. If you have a hundred people in your tournament and you win it, you get a hundred PRPA points. The person that got 50th gets fifty PRPA points, and so on down the line.

It doesn’t matter for us because with the IFPA, the big factor is how many meaningful rounds were played, and the more meaningful rounds played, the more points it’s worth. It’s not dependent upon the number of players, but that’s part of it. They have a very complicated formula. Our formula basically says it doesn’t matter how many meaningful rounds you played. You could play five, you could play fifteen, you could play twenty. Your tournament’s worth the same amount of points, and it’s based on how many people played in the tournament.

Stephanie Wysocki: It’s really interesting because our leaderboard right now: the top three players are people from our scene, and it wasn’t like this for a while. It was a whole gaggle of people in Kansas City dominating the leaderboard. The gal who is at the top of the leaderboard right now is grinding any PRPA event within, I don’t know, probably eight hours. She’s driving to it and playing it. She’s a pretty solid player too. Is she the best player in our scene or any scene? No, but she’s grinding, and she grinded from the bottom quarter of the playfield all the way up to the top.

Mike Felumlee: She’s tied for first right now.

Stephanie Wysocki: So, the fellow that’s tied with her in first, he just went to the state finals. He’s a very, very good pinball player. She played nineteen events; he’s played eleven.

Mike Felumlee: There have been forty Punk Rock Pinball Association events so far, and she has played in nineteen out of the forty. That’s why she’s tied for first. She hasn’t won a single one. The way we constructed our point system, we wanted to really reward players that travel all over the place and are grinding to play the most. They’re hardcore, and people like that are what drive a competitive pinball community. You need these people that just show up all the time because the biggest challenge we all have is participation and getting more players. Pinball is such a tiny niche thing. We wanted a point structure that’s going to reward people that just go and play everywhere.

Stephanie Wysocki: Part of the reason we started this collective is that when you’re a pinball player, when you go out and play at different venues or locations, you’re kind of at the mercy of those locations. Having a healthy business, staying open, and having space for pinball. We’re about two hours south of Chicago and about two and a half hours from Indianapolis and St. Louis. We’re kind of in the middle of nowhere in a lot of ways. It’s a proper town, but there weren’t many places to play. One of our main locations closed, and we were driving an hour to go to another town to play with other people at a venue, and then that place closed too. We have a really special community that has been built here. We kind of took things into our own hands and started the collective for that very reason: it’s so fun to play with other people, and we took our destiny into our own hands.

What’s your favorite machine to play?

Mike Felumlee and Stephanie Wysocki: Jaws. 

What’s your least favorite?

Mike Felumlee: Shrek.

Stephanie Wysocki: Shrek, yeah. It’s garbage. 

Mike Felumlee: Yeah it sucks don’t bother. It’s the exact same machine as the Family Guy machine. I hate them both equally. I like the Family Guy theme better, but the game just to shoot is not fun.

Stephanie Wysocki: It’s not fun; it seems like it would be. The designer is my favorite pinball designer, Pat Lawler. I love him. He did Ripley’s, Funhouse, and Addams Family. Yes, but Shrek he shit the bed on. 

Mike Felumlee: I mean he’s done many, many pinball machines they can’t all be hits. Look at songwriters, every song they write isn’t a hit. 

Stephanie Wysocki: He has a lot of good ones but that one is garbage.

Mike Felumlee: My second favorite right now is probably (Star Wars) The Fall of the Empire. The designer of that one is John Borg, and he’s probably one of my favorites. He also did Metallica, Monsters, The Walking Dead, and Guardians of the Galaxy.

His machines are typically really fast and pretty challenging. Metallica plays fast, and there are lots of shots that will shoot the ball back at your face if you miss. I feel like a lot of his games have a similar feel to Metallica. Fall of the Empire and Guardians of the Galaxy all feel similar. I like the feel of those John Borg games.

For more information and to become a scene rep, contact Mike and Stephanie through the Punk Rock Pinball website.