Twenty-eight hundred dollars. That's the "Buy-it-Now" asking price of this rare Checkpoint Redline pinball cabinet by Data East. In the grand scheme of things, that doesn't seem like a whole lot of cash. Then again, heck, I paid less than that for my first Porsche. And I drove it home. This pinball cabinet might provide you a whole lot more fun than a beat up early 944 would, though. Checkpoint is a rare piece, especially in full working order. Built in 1991, this was the first cabinet design to feature a dot-matrix digital readout, and the first to include a radar speed detector in the ball launching chute. It's a simple two flipper, triple pop-bumper, roll-under spinner cabinet with one 4-bank, one 3-bank, and one single drop target. If you know your cabinets, you want this one. If you know your Porsches, you want this one. If you know both, you're as nerdy as I am.
How many Porsche-related icons can you find littered in the motif of this pinball cabinet? Aside from the headlining impact-bumper 911 coupe and 356 speedster (Plus a Ferrari. Who put that there?) in the backglass and lower playfield, there are Fuchs-style wheels in the cabinet name, there's a tachometer, the tally keeper spells out "CARRERA", and there's even a small scale hot wheels sized model hanging out on the right hand side.
This is an incredibly anorak-ish car-guy's pinball machine, and if you're a Porsche fanatic, this would make the perfect addition to your collection. I would personally love to have this bad boy hanging out in my garage. I could come back from a drive in my 912E or Boxster and play a ball before heading inside. It'd be a fun way to wind down from the adrenaline of a winding back road drive. Conversely, if you live with a Porsche fanatic, and you want them to spend a little less time bothering you with stats about their compression ratio or sparkplug gap, Christmas is right around the corner and this would make a wonderful gift.
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