![]() ![]() ![]() He and his wife, Charlotte, built a 10,000-square-foot building in their backyard to store and restore his machines. In 1990, as the videogame industry boomed, Arnold sold his share of the arcade business, retired and moved to Las Vegas, bringing along 400 of the 1,000 pinball machines he eventually accumulated while shaping his vision of a place for people to play the great machines of the past for fun-and charity. Later, he and his older brother, Tom, owned Pinball Pete’s arcades in Lansing and Ann Arbor, Mich., during the coin-operated Pac-Man era. Collectors for the most part never let the public play their machines.”įor Arnold, half the fun of pinball is watching other people play-not just look at-the vintage machines he has loved since age 14 when he bought his first one, a 1966 Gottlieb game called Mayfair, while growing up in Lansing, Mich. ![]() “Often collectors are wealthy people who have them in their private game rooms. “The Pinball Hall of Fame is the only place in the world to lay your hands on a significant collection of pinball machines,” says Michael Schiess, executive director of the Pacific Pinball Museum in Alameda, Calif., which celebrates the art, science and history of pinball. In a city known for video poker, roulette wheels and slot machines, Arnold has created a nostalgic oasis of vintage pinball machines from the 1940s to the 1990s at his Las Vegas attraction, where both retro-minded novices and genuine pinball wizards pit their prowess against gravity-all while donating quarters to charity. “With a nudge or shake, you can change everything. “It’s man versus machine,” Arnold says later, recapping his performance. “Ping, ping, ping!” sounds the machine as the ball knocks down one drop-down target after another, rhythmically ratcheting up Arnold’s score. Middle fingers on the flipper buttons and eyes focused on a silver ball bouncing around the colorful playfield, Arnold leans forward with quiet intensity-one leg forward, one leg back-using both subtle wrist movements and body-heaving jerks to propel the ball upward. Tim Arnold, 54, is a study in concentration as he hunches over his favorite pinball game, a 1976 Jack’s Open, inside his Pinball Hall of Fame in Las Vegas, Nev. ![]()
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