Coke-bottle glasses and a headlamp give him the appearance of a near-blind spelunker, or some mad genius tucked away in the desert capable of reckless, dangerous things. Real men play with steel balls.”Īrnold’s grey hair hangs in a ponytail down his back. Little babies play games with plastic balls. He is technically retired, but Arnold spends his days overseeing his machines, uninterested in common pursuits of the post-employed. ![]() Walk through the Hall of Fame and play fifty years of history, all for fifty cents a pop. Then came dot-matrix displays, animated figures like Funhouse’s Rudy, and holograms. Classics like William’s Pinbot and Gorgar talked to the players using digitized clips. Starting in 1977, tables began to use solid-state components, meaning a small CPU ran the board, creating digial audio and more complex scoring algorithms. You’ll find no silicon chips here: all action and sound comes from a confluence of earthly materials and physics. The feeling hits hardest while walking down the aisle of electro-mechanicals, tables like Aquarius and Captain Fantastic, from the 1960s and 70s. To stand in front of a pinball table is to be transported to a time when your immediate surroundings were all that mattered Arnold’s oasis holds one-hundred fifty-two pins, from Heavy Hitter (1947) to AC/DC (2011). Cruise by your local watering hole if you’re very lucky you may find one beat-up table in the corner. As it turns out this is exactly what it is: an airy warehouse filled with tables, aligned in some kind of ever-shifting order. Finally, in 2006, he opened the doors to his own kind of pleasure palace: The Pinball Hall of Fame.įrom the street, the building looks like a nondescript storage facility. Over the next decade he gathered and restored over 1000 tables, hosting ‘Fun Nights’ for locals and donating the proceeds to charity. He moved to Paradise, Nevada in 1990, just a mile from that clutch of casinos inhabited by fake Elvises and real addicts.īut he couldn’t leave his machines behind. After having opened a popular arcade in Michigan in the mid-70s, the arcade bust sent him west. Tim Arnold arrived with a very different goal. People arrive with many goals in mind: win money, eat decadent food, marvel at near-naked bodies, shimmering and contorted. Even the name of its main stretch–The Strip–provokes. Game of Thrones? Really? That’s not why I went there, so I ventured deeper into the building hoping to find some of the games I remembered from my wasted youth spent in bowling alley arcade rooms.Las Vegas is a city of lights, loss, flesh, and fantasy. You know, the kinds you’d likely see if you walked into any “arcade” that still had one or two pinball machines just for decor. When walking in the front door, you’re welcomed by several newer pinball games. And since it’s a non-profit, excess revenues go to non-denominational charities. It’s all pure pinball (and a few arcade novelty games) from the past. ![]() There are no ‘ticket spitters’ here (aka kiddie casinos or redemption). Since it is a non-profit museum, older games from the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s are the prevelant, as this was the ‘heyday’ of pinball. The games belong to one club member (Tim Arnold), and range from 1950s up to 1990s pinball machines. A not-for-profit corporation was established to further this cause. The Pinball Hall of Fame is an attempt by the members of the Las Vegas Pinball Collectors Club to house and display the world’s largest pinball collection, open to the public. Here’s a description from the Hall of Fame website. It was totally worth the 10 minute drive to get here. ![]() The Pinball Hall of Fame is located on Tropicana Ave, just a short distance from the Las Vegas Strip. Here I am entering the nondescript entrance of the building. Most of the pictures in the article were taken by Sharon as I was far too busy playing pinball games to take any pictures myself. I have our readers to thank as this was one of the suggestions when I asked about places to see in Las Vegas. This time was all mine and I made sure to take advantage of every second until I felt guilty about keeping her there any longer. More accurately, I should say that this was MY trip to the Pinball Hall of Fame as Sharon really couldn’t have cared less about the visit ( Note from Sharon: true story! But you went to Frankie’s Tiki Bar with me, so…). I was going through my pictures of last year and I realized that I never wrote about our trip to the Pinball Hall of Fame in Las Vegas.
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