# TOPCast 4: Tim Arnold **Source:** TOPCast - This Old Pinball **Type:** podcast_episode **Published:** 2007-02-15 **Duration:** 93m 0s **Beat:** Pinball **URL:** http://www.pinrepair.com/topcast/showget.php?id=4 --- ## Analysis Tim Arnold, operator of the Pinball Hall of Fame in Las Vegas, shares his extensive history in the pinball industry from the 1970s onward. He discusses his evolution from a teenage pinball enthusiast in Michigan to a major arcade operator during the video game boom, detailing his business practices, the transition from mechanical to digital games, and the colorful characters and dynamics of the arcade industry during its peak. The interview covers his current Hall of Fame operation (175+ pinball machines, 25 video games) and its charitable mission. ### Key Claims - [HIGH] The Pinball Hall of Fame has approximately 175 pinball machines and 25 video games in Las Vegas — _Tim Arnold directly states this in the opening description of the Hall of Fame_ - [HIGH] It costs approximately $1,750 per week to cover rent, utilities, insurance, and unavoidable expenses at the Hall of Fame — _Tim Arnold provides this specific figure when discussing operational costs_ - [HIGH] About 50 cents of every dollar in revenue goes to expenses, with the other 50 cents donated to local charities or retained in a building fund — _Tim Arnold states this revenue-split ratio for the Hall of Fame operations_ - [HIGH] Tim Arnold's first pinball machine purchase was a used Gottlieb Mayfair for $165 in the 1970s, split three ways with his brother and another friend — _Tim Arnold describes his early machine acquisition in detail_ - [HIGH] Tim and his brother opened their first arcade (1,500 sq ft) in September 1976 in an abandoned taxidermist shop next to a bar in East Lansing, Michigan — _Tim Arnold provides specific date and location details_ - [HIGH] Tim received factory training from Gottlieb, Williams, Bally, and Chicago Coin manufacturers in 1975 or 1976 at a three-day seminar organized by a local distributor in Grand Rapids — _Tim Arnold describes attending factory training while in high school_ - [MEDIUM] Bally's Italian-influenced management was forced to divest when the corporation needed to obtain a gambling license, after which cocaine use was widespread among executives and sales staff — _Tim Arnold provides anecdotal accounts of cocaine use in Bally during the late 1970s and early 1980s_ - [MEDIUM] A Detroit operator named Rick Ronsky (referred to as 'Sleic Rick') accumulated over $1 million in unpaid debts with Bally before the company ceased collection efforts — _Tim Arnold recounts this story as an example of Bally's operational dysfunction in the early 1980s_ - [HIGH] During the peak arcade years in the 1980s, Tim's arcades in East Lansing were generating $13,000-$17,000 per week in quarters — _Tim Arnold provides specific weekly revenue figures from his arcade operations_ - [HIGH] The Hall of Fame collection includes games from the 1940s to present day, with the oldest game being a 1938 crane machine and the oldest pinball being a 1949 United Rendezvous — _Tim Arnold describes the age range of machines in the Hall of Fame collection_ ### Notable Quotes > "The Pinball Hall of Fame is a collection of pinball machines we threw in a few video games just to keep the kids happy. It's about 175 pinball machines and about 25 video games in a storefront in Las Vegas, Nevada, near the Strip." > — **Tim Arnold**, early in interview > _Core description of the Hall of Fame mission and scope_ > "It takes us about $1,750 a week to pay the rent, the light bill, the insurance, and the unavoidable expenses. And nobody that works there gets paid. Everybody's a volunteer, so we have no labor cost." > — **Tim Arnold**, early in interview > _Explains the Hall of Fame's operational model and non-profit structure_ > "I wanted to be on the radio. I wanted to have my own podcast." > — **Tim Arnold**, mid-interview, when discussing college plans > _Humorous anachronistic remark about his early broadcasting ambitions_ > "I hate school, I hate the man, I hate his plan, I just want to be a pirate." > — **Tim Arnold**, mid-interview, explaining decision to leave college > _Captures his independent entrepreneurial spirit and philosophy_ > "We'd go out to the back of the truck and take a nap if we got tired... Seven days a week? Yeah... That's working hard. Yeah, but we were young and stupid. We had fun with it." > — **Tim Arnold**, mid-interview, describing early arcade operations > _Illustrates the grueling work schedule and youthful attitude of early arcade operators_ > "There was huge rivers of cocaine floating around through all of Bally at that point. They used to call it tootski." > — **Tim Arnold**, latter half of interview > _Shocking firsthand account of drug use in the pinball manufacturing industry during the early 1980s_ > "We didn't have any competition, so we never even went to tokens. We just stayed at quarters. So we had a monopoly. We were able to hold our line on prices." > — **Tim Arnold**, latter half of interview > _Explains competitive advantage and pricing strategy during arcade industry turmoil_ > "Once you make your nut, you don't have an inventory... That's the money I'm living on today is the money I earned back in the day." > — **Tim Arnold**, late in interview > _Reflects on the long-term financial benefits of prudent cash management in the arcade business_ ### Entities | Name | Type | Context | |------|------|---------| | Tim Arnold | person | Founder and operator of the Pinball Hall of Fame in Las Vegas; arcade operator and pinball enthusiast since the 1970s; extensive industry history and expertise | | Pinball Hall of Fame | organization | Nonprofit arcade and pinball museum in Las Vegas near the Strip featuring 175+ pinball machines and 25 video games; operates with volunteer staff and donates revenue to local charities and building fund | | Tom Arnold | person | Tim Arnold's older brother; co-founder of the early arcades in East Lansing, Michigan; business partner in arcade operations | | Gottlieb | company | Pinball machine manufacturer; provided factory training in 1975/1976; well-represented in the Hall of Fame collection (58 machines) | | Williams | company | Pinball machine manufacturer; provided factory training; represented in Hall of Fame collection (31 machines); nearly went bankrupt in early 1980s | | Bally | company | Pinball machine manufacturer and distributor; underwent major management transition when forced to divest Italian influences for gambling license; experienced financial collapse from major unpaid debts and cocaine use in management | | Chicago Coin | company | Pinball and arcade game manufacturer; provided factory training to Tim Arnold; territorial restrictions on sales during 1970s | | Empire Distributing | company | Game distributor serving Michigan area; subsidiary of Valley Company and Walter Kidde & Co.; located in Detroit area; Tim Arnold's primary distributor | | Cleveland Coin | company | Game distributor in Cleveland; became available for direct sales to operators as manufacturing restrictions relaxed in late 1970s | | Rick Ronsky | person | Detroit-area arcade operator (also referred to as 'Sleic Rick'); former gumball machine distributor; accumulated over $1 million in unpaid debts with Bally in early 1980s | | Salvation Army | organization | Primary charitable recipient of Hall of Fame revenues; recognized for efficient operations and effective response to Hurricane Katrina disaster relief | | Pinball Life | company | Pinball parts distributor and supplier based in Chicago; advertiser/sponsor of TopCast podcast | | Domino's Pizza | company | Tim Arnold had 15 pinball machines in one of Domino's first pizza parlors in East Lansing, Michigan, generating approximately $300/week | | Valley Company | company | Parent company of Empire Distributing; subsidiary of Walter Kidde & Co.; represented strict territorial distribution rules during 1970s | | TopCast | organization | Online radio podcast program featuring Tim Arnold as special guest; appears to focus on pinball and arcade history | ### Topics - **Primary:** Pinball Hall of Fame operations and mission, Tim Arnold's personal history in the arcade industry (1970s-1980s), Arcade operator business models and cash flow management, Pinball and video game manufacturing industry dynamics, Early arcade operations and competition in Michigan - **Secondary:** Industry corruption and drug use in pinball manufacturing (1970s-1980s), Charitable operations and community impact, Pinball machine pricing and gameplay accessibility ### Sentiment **Positive** (0.75) — Tim Arnold speaks with nostalgia, pride, and humor about his long history in the pinball industry. His tone is generally upbeat despite discussing challenging industry dynamics. His passion for the Hall of Fame mission and charitable work is evident. Some negative sentiment appears when discussing cocaine use and industry corruption, but it is presented matter-of-factly rather than with rancor. ### Signals - **[venue_signal]** Pinball Hall of Fame operates as a volunteer-staffed nonprofit museum with 175+ pinball and 25 video games in Las Vegas; generates approximately $3,450/week revenue with 50% going to expenses and 50% to charity/building fund (confidence: high) — Tim Arnold provides specific operational metrics and revenue breakdown for the Hall of Fame - **[historical_signal]** Tim Arnold documents the rise of arcade operations in Michigan during the 1970s, including the transition from mechanical to video games, territorial distribution restrictions, and arcade operator strategies during the video game boom (confidence: high) — Detailed personal account of arcade business evolution from 1976-1980s - **[industry_signal]** Widespread cocaine use and corrupt business practices among Bally management and sales staff in late 1970s-early 1980s; major distributor accumulated $1M+ in unpaid debts while company collapsed (confidence: medium) — Tim Arnold's firsthand accounts of drug use at Bally and story of Rick Ronsky's unpaid debts - **[business_signal]** Successful arcade operators in the 1980s generated $13,000-$17,000 weekly revenue through careful cost control (low rent, no employees initially, staying on quarters vs. tokens), competitive advantages (local monopoly), and prudent cash management (confidence: high) — Tim Arnold details his specific revenue figures and operational strategies that allowed him to maintain pricing while competitors engaged in token wars - **[supply_chain_signal]** 1970s pinball industry had strict territorial distribution rules enforced by Italian-influenced manufacturers; operators could not buy outside designated territories; restrictions gradually relaxed as video game market expanded (confidence: high) — Tim Arnold explains the territorial system and how he eventually gained access to Cleveland Coin distributor as restrictions eased - **[operational_signal]** Early successful arcade operations (1976-1980s) operated with minimal labor: Tim Arnold and his brother ran their arcade 10 a.m. to 2 a.m. seven days a week with no employees, covering rest periods by napping in the back truck (confidence: high) — Tim Arnold describes grueling daily schedule maintaining their arcades without paid staff - **[community_signal]** Tim Arnold operates Pinball Hall of Fame with explicit charitable mission, donating 50% of net revenue to local charities (primarily Salvation Army) and building fund for future dedicated facility ownership (confidence: high) — Tim Arnold explains Hall of Fame's business model and charitable focus, praising Salvation Army's efficiency and disaster response - **[restoration_signal]** Pinball Hall of Fame maintains collection spanning 1940s-2000s with approximately 58 Gottlieb, 46 Valley, 31 Williams machines and mix of electromechanical (80 machines) and solid-state (100+ machines); avoids extensive wood rail collection due to low player demand for short flipper games (confidence: high) — Tim Arnold provides detailed breakdown of collection composition and explains decision to exclude wood rail games - **[manufacturing_signal]** Video game boom (1978-1983) dramatically shifted arcade operator focus from pinball to video games; Tim Arnold's arcade went from 80% pinball/20% novelties to 85% video games/15% pinball, though he maintained faith in pinball as a product (confidence: high) — Tim Arnold describes the market shift and his personal strategy to maintain small pinball presence during video game dominance - **[historical_signal]** In 1975-1976, pinball manufacturers (Gottlieb, Williams, Bally, Chicago Coin) coordinated factory training programs through local distributors, offering three-day seminars covering repair, maintenance, relay adjustment, and motor operation theory (confidence: high) — Tim Arnold describes attending comprehensive factory training seminar in Grand Rapids as a high school student - **[market_signal]** During early 1980s arcade competition, operators engaged in 'token wars' where pricing spiraled downward (4 tokens/dollar, 5, 6, 8, 10 for a dollar) eroding operator margins; Tim Arnold avoided this by maintaining local monopoly and staying on quarters (confidence: high) — Tim Arnold explains token wars concept and how his monopoly position allowed him to avoid participating - **[product_concern]** Modern players show strong preference for three-inch flipper games and avoid short flipper wood rail machines; Hall of Fame maintains only 15-20 wood rail games despite their historical value, as newer players ignore them in favor of later-era games (confidence: medium) — Tim Arnold explains decision to limit wood rail collection based on observed player preferences and demand patterns --- ## Transcript You're listening to TopCast, this old pinball's online radio. For more information, visit them anytime. www.marvin3m.com slash TopCast Okay, welcome to TopCast. Tonight we have a special edition, Thursday night edition. And we have a special guest, instead of our usual program. We have Tim Arnold from Las Vegas. who is hosting the Pinball Hall of Fame. And we have Tim on the line, and he's going to tell us a little bit about what he's doing and also his history in the business. And maybe he'll give us some tech tips. And if there's time, we might even be able to take a caller in to maybe ask him a couple questions. So, right now, it is time for our special guest. Special guest. Hey, Tim, how are you? Not too bad. Okay, well, good. Now, Tim, why don't you tell us about the Pinball Hall of Fame? Well, the Pinball Hall of Fame is a collection of pinball machines we threw in a few video games just to keep the kids happy. It's about 175 pinball machines and about 25 video games in a storefront in Las Vegas, Nevada, near the Strip. And it's games from the 40s all the way up to today that people can just wander in. There's no chart of the games right on course, so you don't even buy totes. It's the last real arcade in America. And I have your, on the screen, we have a webcam going too, so people can kind of see what I'm doing. I have up on our webcam your website, which is at pinwallmuseum.org. And maybe you should tell us a little bit about your services to the community and what your big plan is and, you know, what you're doing with the money that comes in through the door. Well, it takes us about $1, 750 a week to pay the rent, the light bill, the insurance, and the unavoidable expenses. And nobody that works there gets paid. Everybody's a volunteer, so we have no labor cost. We also don't get paid if we provide games from any of the local collectors that bring over games. Nobody's paid for that. So it pretty much leaves us free to donate every cent past $17.50 either to local charities or we retain it in our building fund in hopes that someday soon we'll have enough in the building fund to put a down payment on a building we'll actually own. For the first 40 weeks that we were open, our average was $3, 450. So it's about 50 cents out of every dollar that goes into the games goes to pay the expenses, and about 50 cents out of every dollar is either dumped to local charities or retained for our building fund. What is your number one charity that you enjoy? We do quite a bit with the Rampant Salvation Army here in Las Vegas, mainly because they're They're very efficient. They're kind of low-rent like us. Nobody gets rich working there, and everybody just chips in and helps them. I've spent time there. I've talked to everybody at the Salvation Army, and we really like them. We're a good, efficient charity, and there's quite a bit of homeless problem here in Las Vegas. and we're trying to do something about getting people's lives rehabilitated and back on track. And, I mean, the Salvation Army, how did they, you know, you felt really good about them with Katrina, right? Yeah, when the problems down in New Orleans happened, the federal government failed almost completely. They just sat around having committee meetings about committee meetings and nothing happened. The Red Cross failed mostly. The Red Cross had huge amounts of problems. But everybody that was there said that the Salvation Army, for the most part, did a wonderful job. And the reason is probably because the culture at the Salvation Army is not very bureaucratic. It's a military command type structure, and there's not a lot of levels of bureaucracy. There's a local commander, and when something happens, they spring into action. It's mainly about boots on the ground, and it's not about people in suits. Tell me about the games that you have at the Pinball Hall of Fame. On your website, you actually have a game list that shows the number of games, and interestingly, we've got some statistics on that. You've got a total of, for a last count, almost 200 games, of which about 150 are pinball machines, and the rest are some kind of arcade game, which may be video or electromechanical. And it looks like you've got a little over 100 solid-state machines and about 80 electromechanical machines. And Gottlieb is king, about 58 Gottliebs, 46 Valleys, 31 Williams, and 46 other makes, including Sterns and new Sterns. And you've got quite a few new Sterns, too, don't you? Well, that's what our local players want quite a bit. They're also paying 75 cents a game to play the new stuff, and our older mechanical pinballs are still a quarter. Okay, so anything that's electromechanical, any EMs are a quarter. Yeah. How about early solid states? Those are 50 cents. Okay, and then anything, what, 90s and newer, 75? No, anything in the last couple years. Okay, so anything in 2000 or newer, basically. Yeah, I'd say the last, 2005 on up. Okay, okay. And now what's the newest game you have in there? We have the Pirates of the Caribbean. And what's the oldest game you have in there? We have a crane machine from 1938, and pinball-wise the oldest one we have is a United Rendezvous from 49. Cool. And do you have a lot of wood rails in there? No, because the problem I run into is that the average new player today doesn't appreciate short flipper games. What we've found is that people tend to ignore quite a bit the short flipper games, and they demand a three-inch flipper. Now, we're hoping that as time goes along, we can convince them a little bit that the short flipper games are a lot of fun to play. Also, I don't have a lot of wood rails done. I've only got about 15 or 20 wood rails actually done So there's a problem of not having enough stuff ready to go Okay, and why don't we talk about the history Let's talk about your history first Tell me about your first pinball machine, how you came about it How you decided to become Mr. Operator and all that kind of stuff Well, it was back in the 70s, back when dinosaurs rocked the earth I was just a kid in high school and I spent all my time skipping school and playing pinball. This was in a college town in the Midwest and pinball machines were literally everywhere. Every store, every gas station, every supermarket had pinball machines. Excellent! If you stole five pop bottles, you could trade them in for two cents a piece and get a game of pinball. So that's what I spent all my time doing. And then one day I just sat down and figured out, you know, with all these dimes I'm putting in, I should probably think about buying a machine. So we went to the pizza parlor, and the guy who was running the place, he had two machines. He had a Gottlieb Domino that he wanted $300 for, and at the time this was less than five years old, so it was pretty expensive. And he had a Gottlieb Mayfair, which was five years older than that, so it was 10 years old, and he only wanted $165 for that. So me and my brother and another friend shipped in a third each and brought this pinball machine. Who was the other friend? A guy who lived down the block, and my stupid brother. And wait, you've got two stupid brothers, right? Yeah. And that would be Tom and Teddy, but this is Tom that you're talking about, right? Because he's your older stupid brother. So we put it in the garage and the neighborhood kids would come along and put dimes in it and pretty soon it paid for itself. And then we brought the second game... Wait, wait, wait. You had a game in a garage and you were charging your friends a dime? No, not my friends, the neighbor kids. So the neighbor kids weren't your friends? I was a pinball player. They would come over and they would steal money from their parents and play pinball. And you got away with that? Well, for a while the city eventually sent my parents a letter saying that you couldn't conduct commerce in the residential zone. So I had to stop doing that. But meanwhile, I was putting them out in gas stations and frat houses. And we actually got 15 games in one of the first Domino's pizzas. Because Domino's started out in Ann Arbor, and one of their first pizza parlors was in East Lansing. So we actually had, I was in high school, and I had 15 pinball machines in a pizza parlor. that it was making, you know, $300 a week. Was that good money for 15 machines? It doesn't really sound it. Well, you've got to remember, this is the 70s. You've got to adjust all these numbers for inflation. And for a kid in high school, I mean, you know, all my friends had paper routes and stuff, and they had to get up in the morning and freeze their butts off and actually work, and all I had to do was show up and collect the quarters out of the pinball machines. And were they running on quarters, or there was a dime play? It was dime three for a quarter. Gotcha. Okay. And how did you learn to fix these things? The electromechanicals are not that hard. And they were usually common sense things. Most of it is keeping the games clean and replacing light bulbs. Every now and then you'll have a broken wire or some major problem. But it was just an accumulative thing. If you fix them long enough, pretty soon one day you wake up and you realize, I can fix these things. Okay. So, I mean, did you ever attend any formal training on this? Well, I had some electronics in high school, and the factory put on a... Our local distributor had all the factories come to Grand Rapids and do a week of service school. And Grand Rapids was, what, an hour from Lansing? An hour away, right. Okay. So I went for... I skipped school for three days and went up and took a three-day service class. I didn't take the first two days of Richard Jukeboxes. I had no interest in that. but I took three days of factory training, and this was in 75 or 76. They were still teaching you how to fix mechanical games, so I actually had factory training when I was in high school on mechanical games, and I actually got pretty good at it, and then the digital games came along. And wait, wait, wait. Was this Gottlieb that was doing the training, or was it Williams, too? They had Gottlieb Williams, Bally and Chicago Coin. All at once or at different times? It was a three-day thing. They'd have a morning session and an afternoon session. So you mean the morning would be Gottlieb and the afternoon would be Williams? Right. And then the next day, Bally and Chicago Coin. And then there'd be, I think it was a rock roller for some reason, had a soda machine seminar in there. And, you know, just change machines. I learned a whole lot of stuff. Excellent! So I actually had, you know, I could tell the difference between a red spring and a green spring on a ballet relay. And they taught you, you know, correctly how to adjust a relay and, you know, how motors operate and, you know, the theory behind some of their circuits. Now, did you ever go to any college? I had two years of community college, nothing electronic, though. Okay, what were you studying in college? I wanted to be on the radio. I wanted to have my own podcast. That's right. Okay, now that brings us to another thing where you did public broadcast or community broadcast programs? No, no, no, no. I did public access. It was Wayne's World. Wayne's World before Wayne? Yeah. Okay, and tell us a little bit, just for fun and gags, tell us a little bit about that. It was Thursday night. Me and my friends would get together and do a trivia show on the local public access channel that I think about 30 people could see. It was just a goof. It got it out of my system. As I found out when I went to college, Jimmy Carter was the president at the time and the FCC had photos on radio stations that you had to hire so many females and so many minorities in order to qualify for your license. So my guidance counselor told me I could graduate and get my degree, but I probably wouldn't get a job. So at that point, I looked at the fact that between hustling pinball and doing repairs for other operators, I was making $30, 000 a year working part-time. And I had more repairs than I could handle. So it became a question of, I hate school, I hate the man, I hate his plan, I just want to be a pinball pirate. So I shoved off, and that's how I ended up doing it. And when you say you were doing repairs, who were you doing it for? In-home stuff or for operators? Well, they like to call themselves modern bookkeeping, but what they actually were were the CinemaX people that eventually turned into Deja Vu, the topless joints. And they I worked out of the base of a drive-in movie in Durand, Michigan. It was called the Scene Drive-In. And my job was to drive all over Michigan, and fix pinball machines in adult, topless, shoeshine places. And I got $6.50 an hour at the time when the minimum wage was $1.85. Excellent. So I was winning a pretty good wage, and they also paid me the time I was driving in the car plus mileage. Wait, did you say a topless shoe shine place? Topless shoe shine place, yeah. Okay, so is that like a topless grocery store? I mean, these two things don't seem to go together. Shoeshine, topless, I don't get it. It was all a scam. They'd take you in the shoe shine room and give you a blowjob while they were shining your shoes. So it was all a sham. And then the girls would hang around in this game room area that had pinball machines and a jukebox. And the games got actually quite a bit of play. It was very lucrative for them. So the girls would hustle guys that would come in. They'd be standing around topless playing pool and pinball with a terribly sad-looking girl. and I was just hanging around. I was just barely 18. I could just barely qualify to be in the places, but I was doing all the repairs and having fun being a pirate and hearing slurping noises coming from inside the shoeshine booth. Yeah, it was quite an adventure. That's pretty good, Tim. So, I mean, what was the strangest thing that happened when you were trying to fix a game or whatever when you were there? I mean, were you getting good sales? Well, it was always terribly hot. So they had to run around topless so they'd keep the heat jacked up. And I came in dressed for a Michigan winter, so I had to take my coat off, and then I got real hot. I was still hot, so I grabbed a soft drink out of the machine and set it down on the game, and one of the topless shoeshine girls came along and put her cigarette out in my Mountain Dew. And me thinking everything is fine, I grabbed the Mountain Dew and chugged a lug and puked a cigarette butt that goes down my throat inside the Mountain Dew. So I start like puking, and I'm looking around for a wastebasket, and the only wastebasket is next to the Rockola 464, which is a great box, by the way. If you ever have a chance to get a Rocco 464, I recommend it. Yeah, yeah, and with this story, I'm sure it takes on a whole new meaning. And I was puking down into the wastebasket on the side of the jukebox. So that was, you know, just another day in pinball repair. And did you have a gal at the time? I mean, what did she think of this? No, no, I was going to community college. There were no women at night school at community college. Not allowed? No. If they were there, they would do a divorce and they hated men. All right. Okay. Well, now the electronic era comes in, and how did you handle that? Well, at this point, we had just decided that we wanted to open an arcade ourselves. This is me and my older brother. Wait, wait, wait. How did your older brother get involved in this? I mean, you bought the first machine with one friend, your brother, and yourself. And then all of a sudden, did your brother... I assume you were a good pinball player at the time, right? I was okay. Yeah, I just did it for fun. So what did you like better? Did you like playing, or was it more you were into the money, or you were into the... I was into being a pilot. You wanted to work for yourself, you didn't want to work for the man. Yeah, I wanted to be in charge. I wanted to just goof around with pinball machines. So there was no alcohol in East Lansing at the time. So the only bar in town was just outside the city limits. And between the only bar in a college town and an IHOP restaurant was a small 1, 500 square foot taxidermist shop that had gone out of business. and I had an elephant on the roof left over from the taxidermy shop. So we went in, we drew up a business plan, put on some nice clothes, and went to the owner of the bar and asked him, you know, said, well, we went in asking, talking to you about putting an arcade in, you know, the empty space next door. And he says, $3.50 a month, first and last month's rent. Give it to my secretary. She'll get you the keys. And that was literally all he said. And we said, well, do you want to see our business plan and our projections, and do you want to hear what we want to do? He said, $350 give you the keys. He was, like, in a hurry because he was cooking dinner. So we, you know, scraped up $700, and we opened up the first arcade. What year was this? It was September 1st of 76. Okay, so all EMs then. Right, right. Okay. Well, porn had just happened. So we had a pawn. Did you buy that new or used? No, we bought it used for $50. Why, was it not working? No, because the bottom fell out of pawn real quick. Okay, so you mean... The distributors were flooded with them, and they'd take $50 for one. Right. So we had electromechanical gun games, 28 or 29 pinblows, a pool table, and a pawn. and we painted the elephant on the roof of the taxidermy shop pink because we thought it would be real hilarious if people came drunk out of the bar and saw a pink elephant. And so what we did was, you know, instead of going to school and getting a regular job, we would hang around our own pinball arcade spending hours making crank calls to people. I had many, many cassette tapes of us making crank calls to people. And... Was that like a hobby? Yeah, it was boredom. You know, always being 18 with nothing to do. So we would, you know, just hang out and play pinball. And we covered our rent the first week we were open. So it wasn't losing money. So it was doing pretty good. And then, you know, we were like totally happy with it. And then the video game thing hit. And, you know, we had this arcade with a very low cost structure because when you've got $100 electric bills, $350 a month in rent, and no labor, it doesn't take a whole lot to make money. So you mean it was just you and Tom? Yeah. And what do you mean? What hours were you open? We were open like 10 a.m. to 2 a.m. And you two covered that every day? Yeah. Without exception? You had no employees? We'd go out to the back of the truck and take a nap if we got tired, you know, stuff like that. Man. Seven days a week? Yeah, pretty much. That's working hard. Yeah, but we were young and stupid. We had fun with it. Okay, now what other machines were you running, or did you have any other, you know, photo machines, you know, any, you know... No, we didn't start doing that because we had a limited amount of space. This was a tiny, tiny place. Yeah, what was the square footage? 1, 500 square feet. Okay. You know, that's bigger, people have bigger living rooms than that. Right. So there was another space in the city of East Lansing proper that was an entire basement of the building, which was 3, 500 square feet, which was, you know, almost three times what we had. And we went in to talk to the guy, and we ended up signing a lease, and we opened up a second one in this basement. And then the city of East Lansing went wet. They allowed bars in the city of East Lansing. What year was this? This was in 77 and 78. Okay. So we had, you know, had 26 alcohol drinking establishments open within a 10-block area. It became, you know, a bar zone. And we were, you know, again, in a basement, so we had a low-cost structure. We had very very low rent By this point we had hired a couple of employees because we had two stores But then the video game thing started to happen and we saw our numbers double and triple almost overnight. I don't know if you remember the video game era, but people were just lining up quarters waiting to play games like Breakout, Sprint 2, Space Wars, Galaxian and all those games. So even though we called ourselves Pinball Pete's, we went from being 80% pinball, 20% mechanical novelties, to being 85% video games and 15% everything else. So the pinballs took a back seat then? Well, we always bought pinballs. We always had faith in the product and we liked it. We never abandoned it like a lot of operators did. We kept 15% around just because we liked it. But, again, the public votes with their feet. And they moved away from pinball. This was, you know, during the classic, you know, video games are a great thing that happened from 78 through about 83. And now were you still buying used games or were you buying new stuff now? No, we pretty much concentrated on buying one, two, or three of every new machine that came out. Okay. So were you one of the biggest, you know, who was your distributor there in Lansing? We didn't have anything in Lansing. We had to go to Detroit or Grand Rapids and deal with Empire Distributing, which was owned by the Valley Corporation. Okay, and what about in Detroit? It was called Empire. It was on Finkel, which is five mile. And then they moved to eight mile and stayed fair. So they were always kind of down in the hood. But we would go down there, drive down there, and pick up games. What about Chicago or Cleveland Coin? When did they come about? Cleveland Coin came later. They came later, okay. You've got to remember that during the 70s, the manufacturers who were heavily Italian had... You couldn't buy outside your territory. There was a strict hierarchy and a strict set of rules about what you could do. You couldn't buy outside your territory. You couldn't take another man's location. You always paid your bills. And if you didn't, something happened. And what that something was, we never found out because we always paid our bills and we never stole any locations. But then as the video game thing got larger and larger, the people who ran the factories and provided the financing, the Italian people I spoke of, they gradually began to relax the rules and we started buying games from Cleveland Point in Cleveland because that Right, but you had to pay shipping. What was that? No, we just went down there and picked them up. Oh, you would. And now, did you know anybody that, you know, got beat up by the Valley Boys? Yeah, there was people that got hurt. Yeah. And because they didn't pay their bills. And how bad? They got knocked around. Okay. Their cars ruined, you know. All right, Tim, we're going to take a little break, just a two-minute break, and we're going to run a commercial. Commercial? Jagme, you'll be right back with more of TopCast right after this. Give your pinball machine new life with parts from Pinball Life. We ship pinball parts worldwide. Pinball Life is located in the great city of Chicago. Their phone number is 773-202-8758. We have an open-door policy, and you're welcome to call us with your questions and concerns. 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Central Time, Monday through Friday. Their website is at pinballlife.com. Pinball Life. No hassles, just the parts you need best. Get your copy now at pinsvids.com. And now for a word from our lawyer. The entire surprise goes to the Pinball Hall of Fame. First episode also available. Some pinball machines were hurt during the filming of the Pins Vids, but they were all get your deranged DVDs on coinupgoodness.com. Excellent! All right, we're back with Tim Arnold from the Pinball Hall of Fame in Las Vegas, and he was just telling us about, well, the Bally Muscle. So Bally were hand distributors, and they had muscle. Now, what did you know about Slick Rick in Detroit? Well, Slick Rick, he was Rick Ronsky. He started out as a gumball distributor. He would sell gumball machines and gumballs, and then he branched out into games. And about the time that Bally, the corporation, was forced to divest itself of all its Italian influences, before they could get a gambling license, and they had to have certain people and certain business practices have it. And that's when the Italian gentleman left and the guys in suits took over. And the guys in suits were all cokeheads, right? Right. There was huge rivers of cocaine floating around through all levels of Bali at that point. And what year was this? shows. We would see them doing it in the booth, just doing some tootski. They used to call it tootski. Our salesman at Cleveland Coin left his wife and his kids, moved in with his stripper girlfriend who had a heart attack in his bathtub. This was not an old person who routinely has a heart attack. This is somebody who stuck too much crap up their nose and basically stopped working. So cocaine was everywhere throughout everything that Bally did, particularly in the sales rep. In what year was this? This was in the late 70s, early 80s. And when the suits started running things, people figured out that you didn't have to pay your bills anymore and they would still give you equipment. And this is what Slick Rick did. He ran off the tab of over a million dollars with Bally in Detroit. By this time, they'd moved out to Redford, and they were in a nice new building instead of being down in the ghetto. And he stuck Bally for over a million bucks. He said, I can't pay you guys. And they were like, whoa, wow, that's okay. That's what happened. And Bally lost huge quantities of money. Williams was teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. It was pretty weird. Meanwhile, we had three arcades at that point. We had one in the shopping center. We had the big one in the basement. We had the one out in the swamp. The swamp? Wait, wait, wait. What's the swamp? The swamp is the area outside of town where the bars used to be. The one the taxidermy shop. Gotcha. Okay. So we had three, and then the city decided that they didn't want any more arcades. They thought that they were unsightly. So they passed an ordinance that said, in the center of town, there's no arcades allowed. But since we were already there, we were prior non-conforming, they essentially gave us a monopoly. So the whole time, everybody in Detroit was having token wars. I don't know if you remember the token wars. No, what do you mean, token wars? Well, when you switch over to token, you start out at four for a buck. and then the arcade down the street decides they're going to go to five for a buck. And then you do six for a buck, and then they do eight, and then ten, and pretty soon you've got this downward spiral where nobody's making any money. Meanwhile, we didn't have any competition, so we never even went to tokens. We just stayed at quarters. So we had a monopoly. We were able to hold our line on prices. we had very low operating costs because we had low-cost long-term leases that we were paying next to nothing for the space we were in. And meanwhile, every week the totals would go up. Every new game that came out was just bonus money. So we just kept saving our little pirate ship. And we also... Well, I mean, how much money were you making at the time, if you don't mind? We had, I can dig out the actual bookkeeping, but we had $13, 000, $15, 000, $17, 000 a week. Wow. All in quarters. At some point, almost all pure profit, because once you make your nut, you don't have an inventory. And what we would do is, first of all, we bought a warehouse, so that we could have a place to store our stuff. And then we bought trucks and vehicles and we paid our taxes. But you're raising your overhead by doing all that. And we put the, you know, whatever extra money we had, we put in the bank. So that that's the money I'm living on today is the money I earned back in the day. And everybody else was, you know, they refused to pay their taxes because it was a cash business. and they would lose boxes full of money and they would buy drugs with it because you couldn't trace drugs and you kept them. It became total anarchy. Meanwhile, we were just these stupid kids who every week would march down the bank and buy another CD. Wow. CD being, you mean, certificate of deposit, not an audio CD. Yeah. Now, what year is this? Early 80s? Yeah, this is the 80s. We're all during the 80s. Now, I heard that you were, like, shoveling quarters with, like, shovels or something. Yeah, we used to go to the restaurant supply and buy ice scoops, big aluminum ice scoops. And, you know, we'd have to shovel the stuff around, and it was, you know, we were wearing out the shovels, and we had a hole in the floor that we, you know, kept putting all our extra quarters in. And then the floor filled up so we put a steel plate over it and then we built some wooden crates and kept putting quarters into the wooden crates and then one day the room got too full. So we decided it was time to take all the quarters to the bank, so we did. And how long, what did you like, throw it in the back of a pickup or something? Well no, first it took us a week to bag it all up because you just can't take loose quarters of the bank. You have to count them out in thousand-dollar bags and lead seal them. And we had this horrible old coin counting machine that took the ends of your fingers off. And so, you know, it took me basically a week of working about full time to get out of these quarters. We also had crates full of dimes, nickels, and pennies. So, you know, it took me time to get them all counted up. And, you know, we just brought more CDs with it. I mean, you know, you could get 15% interest on a CD during, you know, the 70s and 80s. So it was really a no-brainer. You pay your taxes and put the money in the bank. So that's, you know, what allowed me to equip the arcade business in 1990. Wait, wait, wait, but we're not there yet. There's still some time here before we cruise up to 1990. This is mostly, when did the video game things start to slide, where you weren't, you know, shoveling quarters, you know. Well, it never really died off until about ten years ago, because every wave that would come, there'd be another wave behind it. You know, for a while it was the Pac-Man wave, and then it was the Kung Fu games, the Mortal Kombat wave, wave, and then, you know, there'd be the driving game wave, and, you know, there was an air hockey boom for a while, and a foosball boom, and, you know, the classic pinball boom, you know, when all those great Williams games were coming out, and we just kind of, you know, rode every wave that came along. Now, how was pinball through this whole era? Pinball was always study for us, because we took extremely good care of our games. we would replace flipper parts when the flippers got weak we would keep them clean we actually cared about our product enough I'd like to say they were perfect but I know they weren't but we at least made an effort and the customers seemed to like that we also brought every new game that came out whether it was good or not and now old games like this is in the 80's let's say you were at the mid 80's now what about all the EM's from the 70's What did you do with all those? We were just stacking them up in the warehouse because when the money hoes started, you know, spewing money out of a three-story warehouse in the ghetto, and we had two, we lived on the top floor, and we used the bottom two floors for storage. You mean you roomed with your brother? Well, no, we had separate rooms. We didn't sleep in the same bed. No, I wasn't implying that. No, I meant that you two had the, basically you had an apartment together or... Yeah, we had the whole top floor of the warehouse. He had half and I had half. And how big was that? It was 3, 300 square feet per floor. So you were split in 3, 300 square feet, you and your brother? Yeah, living upstairs. And you were getting along with Tom okay at the time? We fought like dogs and cats. Really? Yeah. But you lived together? Yeah. But you didn't really talk to each other? Well, no, we talked, we screamed at each other a lot. And what were the fights over? Everything. What time of day it was. What color is blue? Was it always like that or did something happen to make this? It was extreme pressure. Because you've got to remember that we never planned to have this thing take off like it did. And it was just, also a lot of it was sibling rivalry. You can't really expect to do that that intensely with somebody and not come out to a certain degree hating them. It's like when you and Norm got your divorce. No, that's still a work in progress. Yeah, it was, you know, plus I got definitely sick of it because my precious pinballs kept, you know, losing market share. And I looked at this huge warehouse full of games, and I said, you know, what am I going to do with them? You know, they're just stacking up down there. So I decided I was going to quit doing it, and I sold my share to my little brother. In what year was this? This was in 1990. And when you sold your share to your little brother, what did he get? Did he get the warehouse full of games, or did he just get the business part? No, he got the business as an ongoing concern. All color video games. I got all the black and white games. And I got all the pinballs that weren't currently being operated. And how many pinballs was that? Hundreds. Hundreds? Like how many hundreds? Low hundreds, or are we talking high hundreds? Three to four hundred were stacked up in the warehouse. Yes. Mostly EMs or solid states? A little bit of everything. Okay. You never did tell me, how well did you make the transition from EM to solid state as far as repairs and that? It was a complete night and day difference. Everything I knew I had to unlearn and learn something new. Did they have schools for that at the time? They had schools for that and they also had factory support. Were you running mostly Bally Williams or Gottlieb or all? Everything. you have the most or least problems with? Solid state-wise. The most reliable were the Gottlieb System 1 games. Pardon me, say again? The Gottlieb System 1 games, when they were new, those are the games we would put out on the street in the bars. They were the most reliable? They were the most reliable. And were you doing the ground modifications or anything like that? No, because it wasn't needed. When the games were new, and before the power supplies got baked and the connectors got flaky. Because the PPSR-4 was a very slow and reliable operating system, it actually ran better than the Bally games. And also, there was only one socketed chip on a Gottlieb game. Bally Williams used lots of sockets, and sockets had a tendency to fail. Okay, and that was happening even when the games were new on Bally and Williams? Yeah, there was always socket problems. And how about the 40-pin connector between... That wasn't much of an issue until later. Okay. Mainly what it was was the damn orange sockets on the valleys and the scabney sockets on the Williams case. Yeah, the famous scambies, yeah. Yeah, scabneys. Well, scambies. Scabneys. Scambies. Say it, scabney. Okay, fine. And so, now, the orange sockets, though, went away pretty much by 79 in valleys. and then they went to black sockets that were much higher quality. Did you still have problems with ballys at that point? Yeah, ballys were okay. We just liked to run the Gottlieb games because the flippers were better. They were more reliable. The linkages didn't wear out and break like they did on the other ones. The bumpers were made of heavier metal. The coin doors were better. Gottlieb was really, a lot of people looked down their nose at the System 1 games, but they were just incredibly reliable. Now, when they were new? When they were new. Now, what about System 80? How did that work out? System 80 was crappy right from the get-go. Right from the get-go. So you had Black Holes and Haunted Houses and they weren't worth a damn? Well, yeah, because those two games in particular, they weren't used to making multi-level games, so the balls would continually get stuck. Okay. Okay, so they didn't do well for you? No, reliability-wise, they weren't well, but they did make a lot of money. Now, what was the big reliability problem with System 80s when they were new? The balls kept continually getting stuck, and there was no way for the game to figure it out. Right, there was no way to adjust for it. And it was a gradual cheapening of the mechanisms. As the Gottlieb family left and Columbia Pictures began to take over, you began to notice that corners were beginning to get cut here and there. that the metal was no longer hardened, that things that used to be beefy suddenly got wimpy. They started making their own wiring harnesses in North Dakota, which I could never figure out why they did that. You mean opposed to the Chicago, the old Polish ladies in the Chicago factory doing that? That all got transferred to Minot, North Dakota, for some reason. and they just, you know, it suddenly became all these, they spent all this money on hiring people in suits with marketing degrees to send out surveys to find out what their customers wanted and basically, you know, what I'd write down on the surveys was, you know, bring back the nice flipper bearings. You know, make your drop targets beefier so they don't always break. You know, stuff like that. They just ignore that and come out with a new advertising campaign that said, you know, what's new is blue, the new Gottlieb System 80 games. And, yeah, I really got sick of Gottliebs about 1983. What was, like, the last good System 80 game that you could stand? Well, there were some good games. There were some great games to play, but the problem is the damn things weren't reliable. Okay, now what about... With an operator, you know, it's not the fact that they, you know, took out a 50-cent part and put in a 10-cent part. That wasn't the problem. The problem was you had to run a truck somewhere out to a distant location, and it took you an hour to get there and an hour to get back to replace something that's bad right out of the box. So the economics of unreliable games really pissed me off. Now, what about Williams at this time? Williams was getting better. After they got rid of the dual board system and went to level 9 and above, they became extremely reliable. Right, so you were having problems with the system 3 through 7s? Yeah. Okay, I mean, you said that they were okay when they were new. How long was it before they just didn't work out? Well, as an operator, we wouldn't run anything past, you know, five or six years. Okay. We'd just park it in the warehouse. And towards the end of the five or six years, there would be issues with sockets. And you've got to remember that the Williams mechanical assemblies were not as nice. They weren't as well designed, and they were made out of thinner and cheaper materials. The flippers, the bumpers, the side kickers were constantly falling apart. Okay. Okay, now what about Bally? Bally was good up until they moved out of the Chicago plant and they moved out to the suburbs, and then all of a sudden there was assembly errors everywhere. Like what year was this, or what game? Like 83, 82, 83. So 8-ball deluxe-ish? Right. 8-bar deluxe is probably the last good game we had from them. As far as money-making or as far as quality? As far as everything. Yeah. Okay. You know, you're looking at games like Motor Drum and Black Belt, and you look at it, the first time you look at it in the distributor showroom, you say, what an ugly, ugly machine. And then you look at the cabinet and you say, wow, they really cut corners. They didn't even put stainless steel rails on it. And you look at the coin door and you say, you know, that's just a flat steel coin door. What happened to the nice stainless steel one that never bends? And you look at the flipper buttons being plastic and you say, some kid is going to come along with his lighter and melt those. And it just became a race to the bottom to see which manufacturer could turn out crappier stuff quicker. Now, what, I mean, Williams was now moving, let's say we're in the mid-80s, you know, 86-ish, and Williams is now high-speed-ish, System 11. Right. And they're getting in a, and Bally is 6803. Right. And Gottlieb is, of course, still System 11. We went by the 6803 game. We tried one of them and said never more. No more. So you were done with Bally then? Pretty much, yeah. Okay, so the only thing you're buying is basically Williams because you're done with Gottlieb too, right? Right. Well, the thing that sold us on Williams is an operator, and this is what your average fanboy doesn't understand, is that High Speed was the first game with auto Yeah and thank you Larry DeMar That Larry DeMar all the way Which believe me just opened up a huge new possibility for us We no longer had to worry about what the replay score was And with replay boost, they could win one game, and the replay level would go up. Automatically. Right, and then they would win again and it would go up again. See, our biggest fear as an operator was, what if a really good player came in and put 15 games up on the machine and played all day on one point? That was just death to us. But then along comes high speed, and all of a sudden, a complete area of our management got removed and was done automatically by the computer. And so we could put a high speed out or a pinbot out, and it would make more money because it wasn't getting its ass kicked by some little 12-year-old that could play the game too well. And they were the only company doing that, right? Yeah, yeah. Others caught on later. Right. Now what about Data East? From a hardware standpoint, it was just a beautiful thing. Now what about Data East? They came out in 1987 with Laser War. Did you buy that? Never, never. I think we bought the one with the back-to-the-50s time machine was the only one we bought. Yeah, and that was about 1988. Yeah. Okay, that was the only one you bought? Was that any good? Yeah. It was a good game. It was mechanically a little flimsy, but again, why buy anything else when you can run games like High Speed and Pinbot and all those games, they made money, they ran well, and they percentage themselves. Okay, so how about Fired? Were you running Fired? Yeah, we bought Fired. We bought pretty much everything. Police Force, all those games. And Elvira and the Party Monsters? Yeah, great game. Now, what about when Williams bought Bally? That was a non-event, because all they did was buy the name, and they bought the distributors in Europe, is all they bought. That had nothing to do with the real world. and Bally ceased to exist with that last game they made. Right, right, right, right. So Atlantis was now Williams, and you were buying that stuff, and you were okay with it. Right, right, because it was, you know, the good... I didn't know it was Larry DeMar and people like that at the time. Yeah, Larry DeMar came in... I wouldn't know Eugene Jarvis if he jumped up and bit me in the ass, but I know for a fact that all his video games made a lot of money. Yeah, Larry DeMar came in at System 4. Right. And, you know, like, for instance, if you were used to going into the audit and diagnostics mode on System 3, it sucked. But as soon as System 4 came about, all of a sudden that stuff all started to make sense, and diagnostics were easier to use, and, you know, adjustments made more sense. Like, if you wanted to adjust, like, a Williams World Cup, like changing from three ball to five ball, oh, good luck. That was, like, no fun. Right. You know, and then Larry came in. Larry, people don't understand what Larry did to pinball. Larry DeMar is a god. He's pretty much the software god of pinball. If Larry DeMar wrote the software for the machine, the machine was good. You know, and that was, you know, Larry was, you know, all the way into the 90s. Right, and little things like a watchdog circuit. That if the program deviated, it would reset. Gottlieb's idea was, well, we'll just tack on another board. with a resistor and a couple of jump wires, which never worked at all on System 8. Meanwhile, Williams included a watchdog circuit that would reboot the whole thing if there was a problem. And again, the Williams games ran. We didn't really know why. They just ran better and they made more money. Right. And the kids would come in and they'd say, what? The kids would come in and say, you know, this is what we want. You know, we don't want that Gottlieb game. You know, we want the latest Williams game. Okay. All right, Tim, we're going to take another little break and let you regain yourself, and we'll be back in just a second. Okay. Norman Shagney will be right back with more of TopCast right after this. This portion of TopCast is brought to you by Pin Game Journal, covering the world of pinball. Visit them online at www.pingamejournal.com. The Pin Game Journal is a proud sponsor of TopCast. It covers pinball like no other publication can. The Pin Game Journal is America's only pinball publication. Whether you're looking for new games or the classics, reports on industry shows or collector expos, insights on a game you want or features to help you fix the game you've got, Pin Game Journal is for you. Their website is at pingamejournal.com. Topguest is brought to you by Marco Specialties, your pinball parts superstore. Visit their website at marcospecialties.com. You can search for parts by game name, game make, or part number. Marco Specialties was founded in 1985 and is headquartered in Lexington, South Carolina. They specialize in pinball parts, supplies, books, and anything pinball. Marco has been online since 1996 and is the web's oldest and largest pinball parts supplier. Their new 12, 000 square foot distribution center services 25, 000 customers in over 50 countries. Feel free to call Marco Specialties at 803-957-5500. Marco Specialties, your pinball parts superstore at marcospecialties.com. Okay, we're back with Tim Arnold. Tim Arnold of the Pinball Hall of Fame. And Tim? Yeah. So you're running High Speed, you're running Fire, you're running Elvira and the Party Monsters, and this is the late 80s, and now it's about 1990, and that's it, you're done, you're selling out. Yeah, it was time to leave. Okay, and what made you say it was time to leave? Well, I didn't enjoy video games, I particularly didn't like kung fu video games, and that was where 80% of our action was, and my little brother was all anxious to expand. And how old, now, how did your little brother come into this? Well, he'd been working for us on and off. So he was an employee? Yeah, he was an employee. And this is Teddy. He didn't want to be an employee anymore. He said, I'm either going to get, you know, a chance to be part of this or I'm leaving. Now, how old are you at this time? Uh, 35. And how old is Teddy? Uh, 30. So he's five years younger. Yeah. Okay. And how did you get along with Teddy? Nobody got along. You mean Ted, Tom, and you, you all hated each other? Yeah, basically. It was like a rock group, a very bad rock group. So why would, you know, so is it, you know, had you made your money and you just said, I don't like the business anymore, I'm done? Well, yeah, it became, literally the tail was wagging the dog. Because at that point, you know, the arcade income was 10 or 15 percent of what we did, and the interest in them was 8 percent of what we did. So, you know, we didn't even need the damn arcades. And I thought I owed my brother a shot at it, and I didn't really want to do it anymore. You mean the old Teddy? Yeah. And now how did Tom feel about you getting out? He hated everything. If I thought of it, it was automatically wrong. So you guys just weren't getting around long at all? No, it was time for a change. It was time for a lot of changes. Right. So you were the first one to sell out. Right. So now it was Ted and Tom were the brothers. And Mike Reynolds, a manager, who also bought half of my share. Okay, so you sold out half of your share to Reynolds, half of your share, the other half to Teddy. And I got the hell out of Dodge. I took all the pinball machines, moved them in trucks, and moved them west. Right, okay. So now you moved in, why Las Vegas? Well, because I wanted to open a large pinball museum. So, right from the beginning, you thought this pinball hall of fame thing was the way to go? Yeah. But I mean... It wasn't an economic decision though. Okay. It was just something I wanted to do. Right. And was the weather a factor? The weather was a factor and I needed something that was warm and dry and I needed a state with no income tax. Because when I sold my share to my little brother, I was a legal resident of the state of Nevada, so I didn't pay the state of Michigan 4.6 bucks. and 4.6% of everything I earned in income tax. So I became a tax exile. I actually moved out here on paper in 88. Oh, really? Yeah. Okay. So did you have a residency in 88 in Las Vegas? Yeah. Even though you were still doing the, you know, you still were... Well, Nevada. But you were still operating in Michigan. Because the Commerce Clause of the United States Constitution says you can't stop people from moving between states, and I took advantage of that. Okay, okay. Plus, Michigan, the handwriting was on the right. Michigan was slowly spiraling down, as it continues to do today. Right, you mean because of the auto industry? And the whole attitude of the state in general. The bureaucracy, and especially a bureaucracy that hates the entertainment business. When I moved out to Las Vegas, what I found was, it was like that scene in the Godfather movie where Hyman Roth is sitting talking about, we finally have an administration 90 miles away from the United States that understands us, that lets us conduct our business as we feel we should. And this is how I felt when I moved to Nevada. Nevada, especially Las Vegas, is a company town. And the company is entertainment. If you have an entertainment idea, they roll out the red carpet for you. It's like living under a circus tent. You know, I might have, down the street I've got a neighbor who's got a trapeze set up in his backyard because he's a circus performer with Circus Stole. And this, you know, this is like living down the street from an auto worker in Michigan. It's just that common to have, you know, Michael Jackson impersonators walking through the grocery store at midnight, or being on the bus and seeing a contortionist practicing her act, and things like that. It just doesn't happen in Michigan. So I moved out here because there's a lot of tourists, it has a friendly atmosphere towards entertainment projects, and it's warm and dry. Okay. Okay, so when you get out there, you're basically retired. Yeah. That's it, you're done. Yeah. And what did you do for the, you know, I mean, did you have this vision right away, or was this... Well, I slowed down for one thing. You did what? I slowed down a little. Okay. I took a few years where I didn't really accomplish a lot. You know, I moved out here, that took a couple years, I built a shed in the backyard, I rebuilt three or four hundred pinball machines to return them to as-new condition. Well, so when you moved out, how many machines had you acquired at this point? I had acquired 54% of all the Gottlieb games ever made. 54%. Right. And you obviously had a percentage of Bally and Williams, too. Right, and a lesser percentage of the others. Right. 54% of all Gottliebs. So then I decided that I wanted to get one of every game. One of every what game? Gottlieb game ever produced. 384 different games. What, that's how many games they made from 47 up? Right. That's by my count. What do you mean your count? Well, other people count certain two players as four players and add a ball as three players, and you can split hairs. Right, so... Some people say there's as few as 350, and some people say there's as many as 500. So what do you mean? So let's take, for instance... McRaven, Big India. It's not the same game. Okay, is it? No, you can have one or the other, and then you cross it off your list. Then that's how you did it. Is Dragonettes and Seabows the same game? 54 Dragonettes and Seabell's the same game? No, I don't think they're the same. It's the same place, though. Down to the millimeter. Right, but different artwork. The only thing that changed is the art. Right. Is that the same game? Okay, so you say that's the same game. I say that there's 384 of them. Okay. Of unique games. Right. Now, what about Crosstown and Hurdy-Gurdy, which would Crosstown's the... That's one game. Either one of them would qualify. Okay. All right. Now, but as things moved into the solid-state era, it was less convoluted. Right. Okay. All right, all right. And so you're trying to get one every game. How long did it take you to pull that off? I finished in 94. In 94. Okay. Now, when did this effort that you're going to give back to the community, when did that? Well, that happened right away because we started doing an event called Fun Night where I would invite people over. The first one was held in the house here before we even built the shed. to find the shed the shed is a 10, 000 square foot building in the backyard and that's like an L-shaped building because you have a tennis court in your backyard, right? are you a tennis fanatic? no have you ever played tennis? I think I played one game on that new tennis court? yeah, and then the dog ate the net so Schmo decided one day he was just going to go back there and eat the thing And that was it. So what did you use the tennis court for? Storage. What, it's game storage? Yeah, game storage, dead games, auto parts, you know, anything. Okay, so why didn't you just, and the shed went L-shaped around the tennis court. Why didn't you just implode the tennis court and make it more shed? Because the county had a limit on the amount of roof you could have. I was at my roofed limit literally down to the inch with the building I built and did the neighbors like your building? no they were pretty pissed and you didn't get any kind of approval on that? no I got permits and stuff it was legally built but it was within the zoning down to the inch right in 10, 000 square foot building right heating, electricity, cooling it had all the electric I needed but no plumbing because plumbing would have involved it going on the tax rolls. As an accessory outbuilding with no plumbing, it didn't go on the tax rolls. Right. Okay. So I started having this fun night event, which was in the shed in the backyard, and the first couple times we said, you know, just bring some canned goods, you know, or some shampoo to help out the local women's shelter. And then I remember at one of them, a guy came up to me and said, you know, you're doing this too cheap. You're letting these people off too cheap. You should just charge them $20. So the next time, you know, we decided, well, instead of charging them, you know, because then we'd get into, you know, it not being a commercial event, which we never wanted to do, we decided that we would just raffle, you know, we'd get them to buy $20 worth of raffle tickets. You know, it was voluntary. They didn't have to buy the raffle tickets. and there were several students that came up with $2 and said, this is all I've got. I have to fill my gas tank to get here. Give me a ticket for $2. So we would sell one ticket for $2, but we'd like to get people to spend $20. And then we would just give the money to the Salvation Army. Okay, so at this time, back in Michigan, you're still getting monies from Teddy? or how's that working? Things were rolling right along. They got, you know, the vast majority of the Mortal Kombat money. They did pretty well with that and the giant driving games. Okay. They also did well with the first generation of CD jukeboxes. So they had some good years in there. And how was Tom doing? Did he sell out his share too? Yeah, he eventually sold out and left too. So Tom is retired. Yeah. And you're retired. and now you're doing all this community service stuff. Is Tom helping you? Not huge quantities of them. Mainly what I was doing was having a fun night twice a year and giving the money from the games at the hot dog stand on the corner where I had a few pinballs to the Salvation Army. It got down to, you know, one year I think we did like a couple thousand dollars is how low it got at one point. But mainly what I was doing was one game a week. I would pull into the house and completely from the ground up restore it. Now let's talk about this restoration. What all would you do? Everything. Every conceivable thing that I could make the games more reliable. And, you know, I had to put coin shoots back on them. You know, I polished the legs, put new feet on them. Completely rebuilt the playfields. Rebuild the playfields? Describe. All new bumper parts were rebuilt. All new flipper parts, including links. New coil stops. I would re-anchor everything to the playfield correctly. I would take all the sockets out, clean them, solder them shut, and reinstall them. I'd put a power saver circuit on to turn off certain lights at the end of the game, rebuild the score dials, move the worn parts from the first player to the fourth player, and vice versa so that I had fresh new parts on the first player. Anything I could think of that would make the games more reliable. And, for instance, you talked about the GI circuits. You hate GI circuits. I hate GI circuits. Okay, tell me a little more about that. Well, lately, it's been a real problem because electric rates have gone through the roof out here in the West. We paid $1, 400 in August for electric. For the Pinball Hall of Fame. The Pinball Hall of Fame, for 200 games. And that's despite our best efforts. So since then we've been replacing incandescent lamps with LEDs. We've been replacing incandescent lamps with compact fluorescent lamps. I did a Gottlieb wipeout last week and I took out 59 number 555 bulbs from the hip at a watt and a half each. So there's almost 100 watts there. And I replaced it with one 9-watt circular fluorescent bulb. You're talking about in the backbox though, to light up the back glass. Yeah. And this is Wipeout is 1993, a Dot Matrix, Gottlieb System 3 game. Right. Okay. And so you take all the 555s out. I take the whole wooden panel out. You take the whole wooden panel out. It has the name of the game on it, so I'm not throwing it out. I'm storing it so that if anyone ever wants to go back to the original, all they have to do is unscrew the light bulb that I put in and put the wooden panel back in. Okay. But meanwhile I've taken 59 1.5 watt bubs and replaced it with a 9 watt bub. Okay. Now you're talking about LEDs. Yeah. Now how are you implementing LEDs into your games? I'm putting them in instead of an incandescent bub. No, I mean, what are you talking about? Are you talking about replacing 47s and 555s? Yeah. Okay, now what's the first game you did this on? I think I did it on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Okay, so that's a Data East game. So it's got a light board, and basically what you... These aren't GIs. These are driven lamps. Right, you're talking about the CPU-driven lamps. Right. The thing with LEDs is the light comes out real hard out the end, and none of it comes out the side. So you can't use them for GI, because all they do is point straight up in the air. Bu t if it's diffused... You have to continue to use incandescent bulbs on the play field. but underneath an LED is actually perfect because the light comes out real hard on the end and illuminates the lens under the play field quite a bit. Right, and to be honest with you, though we're not going to see it in Family Guy, the game after Family Guy, I hear by Stern, is going to use LEDs under... Right, there won't be an incandescent bulb left in America in 10 years. Right, it's going to be all LEDs. Right, so Stern is... Electric bills are killing everybody. Right, and so Stern is actually going to be doing this for the CPU-driven lights. And the other thing about LEDs is they never burn out. Well, it's not used the word never. 60, 000-hour light. Compared to a 5, 000-hour light. Right, compared to a 5, 000-hour light. For number 44, 47s, and 555s. And light-emitting resistors, which is what we call the frame throwers that are incandescent bulbs, hate to be switched on and off. It's very hard on the filament. Meanwhile, LEDs love to be turned on and off. They just live for it. Okay, so you did Teenage Ninja Turtles. Right. And you were satisfied with how that looked. Right. So what's the next game you did? Well, we've done 15 or 20 of them now. And have you noticed any difference in your bill? Yes, it has. It's stayed about the same despite the fact that rates are going up. Okay, okay. So we're committed to a long-term gradual phasing out of flamethrowers and installation of LEDs. So when you do this, so say you've got, say you're on a Williams game. What's a Williams game that you've done? Funhouse, perfect example. Funhouse. So you've got all these light bulbs with the twist-in 555s underneath the play field. Take those out. Right. Put them in a bag in the bottom of the game in case you want to go back to that. Right. Solder an LED across the pad. Right. Put a 100-ohm quarter-watt voltage drop resistor on either the row or the column. Now, do you have to do that for, like, say you've got a lamp board that has 10 lamps on it on Funhaus. Right. So you've got 10 LEDs, and how many resistors? Well, you can get, there's up to eight on any row or column. Right. So you can do up to eight. Okay. And at that point, you usually end up with a resistor sometimes on every socket, sometimes on up to eight sockets. Okay. And you're pretty comfortable with this, and you're buying your LEDs from what, how much are you spending for LEDs? I'm spending a dime for an LED. A dime for an LED. And what is the, you know, the LEDs come in different light values as far as light emittance. Right. What value are you picking? And what color? Well, no, I get a hyper-white LED, which I just started making a while ago. And I got a close-out deal on 3, 000 of them. Okay. So you can get them. If you buy 3, 000, you get them cheaper. Right. I think I actually paid eight or nine cents. And you using white LEDs Right white LEDs which actually are a little blue So your purple lenses look really purple and your yellow lenses have a tendency to turn green Okay. So your funhouse looks a little creepy with green lenses in the middle. You're not actually changing the plastic on the lens, but the yellow and the blue combine to make a green light. So it looks a little different. It looks a little different, but it doesn't look bad. And has anybody complained? No. And the income from the games hasn't dropped. And has anybody even said anything to you? A couple people have said, what's this funhouse with the green lenses? And I said, it's not green lenses, it's a blue light. Huh. Okay. So you've done, you said you're up to almost 20 games? Yeah. How long does it take you to convert a game? Three, four hours. Okay. You know, everybody talks about global warming and, you know, saving the Earth, but most people are just flapping their gums, not actually doing anything about it. The answer to the problem isn't some high-tech ethanol conversion plant that's going to take pork whoops and change them into electricity. The real answer is as simple as unscrewing these obsolete old technology bulbs everywhere in America and replacing them with LEDs and fluorescent bulbs. I'm down with it, Martin. Most of my... I don't think I have any incandescent bulbs in my house anymore. There won't be any left anywhere soon. I'm running fluorescents everywhere. I don't think I have a single incandescent, aside from what's running in my pinball machines. Right. Because I've got over 100 games set up in my basement, working games. And when you had your little fun night, you were complaining that you had to go around and reseat whole bunches of light bulbs, those damn chick-like 555 bulbs that everybody hates. Right. And you can fix them, and then a week later you go back and fix them again. Right, exactly. So not only is it bad technology, it's not fastened correctly. Right. So you end up getting bit in the ass twice. So we're doing that. We're having fun with it. I enjoy the R&D aspect of buying some LEDs and fiddling around with them. Right. And Stardust apparently hasn't picked up this idea from you. I've heard they've been doing... No, no, no, please me. I didn't invent LEDs. Right. The people that's making this change possible is Southern California, Edison, Commonwealth, Edison, and Nevada Power. You know, you just simply can't keep paying for electricity at these rates for long before you figure out, I've got to make a change. I've got a guy that's got a little Mexican restaurant that's got a $1, 200 electric bill for a 600-square-foot taco stand. And he says, you know, I don't make that myself in a month. So, you know, it's one of these things where they work better. Okay. Well, let's change gears a little bit. The Pinball Hall of Fame opened in what year? February of last year. Okay. And how much is actually going to the Salvation Army every month? Well, right now, we were hoping to get it on a percentage deal, but what we found out is that there's local collectors that loan us games. See, this one guy loaned us the Lord of the Rings. He said, you know, you can just use it, but I want 100% of the money to go to charity. So I said, fine, you know, you can be a hero. We'll put 100% of your game towards charity, and we'll pull the freight with the store with, you know, the other games. So we've done that with, you know, two or three specific games. But you also have to understand that we have this thing called the building fund, which is money that sits in a bank account, We're hoping that in the next two years and ten months that we have left on our lease, that between now and the end of the lease, we gather up enough money to actually put a down payment on a building we would own. That the Las Vegas Pinball Collectors Club, a not-for-profit corporation, which files a tax return and is 100% legal, would be able to own this building. Then we wouldn't pay rent. Our situation right now is we're pissing $5, 600 a month down the raffle, as we call the landlord. A landlord that I haven't seen or heard from in six months. The landlord. Yeah, you know how everybody loves landlords. So we're trying to eliminate that by owning the building. Right. And the problem with that is if you talk to commercial real estate guys, they don't care about PINDA. They don't care about charity. They care about one thing, maximum revenue per square foot. And what they want to see is $2.2 million, and they're not going to give you a one-cent discount because you're a charity. If anything, they want more from you because you're an iffy proposition. You know, they'd rather sell it for Rite Aid because they know Rite Aid is always going to pay them. Gotcha. So we're hoping right now we've got $470, 000 in the bank. that's earning interest. And we hope that by the time the lease is up, our goal is a million bucks. And at that point, if we found a $2 million building, we could put half down and have a mortgage we could afford. Who's your biggest contributor outside of you? Larry DeMar is a god. Oh, wait a minute, no, no. This old pinball is a god. Every time you buy this old pinball tape, the profit from the tape or the disc goes towards the building bunk. So who's your biggest contributor outside of yourself financially to the pinball hall of fame? Well, no, I haven't taken any money out of my pocket. No, I know, but you're... But I've put 12 years of my life, which is worth something. Right, right. And, you know, I've paid for... And when you romp up a game that you've got doubles of and you sell it, all that money goes into that. Fun night, I pay for everything out of my pocket. Right. So, yeah, I have contributed. Right. But I suppose number two would be this old pinball. Let's talk about other stuff. What about Steve Kordak and his visit to the Pinball Hall of Fame and the loan of the Pinball Circus? Well, the Pinball Circus is a one-of-a-kind game that Williams was going to make, but they didn't make. And they spent $1.5 million to completely finish a game. Right. This is ready to go to production. This isn't a whitewood. The programming is finished. The sounds are finished. They made that little elephant. They made everything in it. And they decided not to build it. And Larry DeMar, who is a god, and Steve Kordak, who's a really cool old guy, decided to loan us this game. So we now have one of only two pinball circuses in the world. Where's the other one? Neil McCaskill's basement. Neil has the other one? That's what I heard. Can we go over there and just beat up Neil? Because Neil was the bastard that killed Pinball at Williams. No, you don't beat up people with Italian names. Get a clue. Anyways, we've got it. You can come in and play it. See, this is where we differ from most collectors. Our object is to get the games out in public instead of sealing them in a bag, making them absolutely pristine, and then never playing them. You know, I talked to collectors who said, I've got a home use only 9.9 surf and safari that has only had 300 plays in it. And, you know, I just want to slap these people. And I say, look, this is commercial equipment. People should be playing it. People should be putting quarters in and having fun with it. You know, this hoarding mentality really bugs me. Tell me about Hippie. The Hippie. He's this guy that's been with me since 1978. He's been working, he worked since 1978 at Pinball Pete's. Right. Now he's out here helping me with the Pinball Hall of Fame project. Okay. Mainly because his skill set is now obsolete. Skill set? There's not a lot of people around that can use a guy that's good with cleaning pinballs. Right. So, you know, my little brother started getting more into, you know, street locations and jukeboxes and everything but pin lap. And the hippie was kind of underutilized, and he was kind of sick of Michigan, so he just left and came out here, and he's helping me now. So you mean, you had him from 78, he was working for you. Through 90. Through 90, and then... 90 through 2000 and whatever, 2005 when he moved out here. He was working for Teddy. and getting treated like Dougie do. So we've got, between us, we've got 50 years of incompetence. Between the two of us. So then you move him out to Las Vegas. Right. And where does he live? He lives here with me at the house, and I pay him out of my pocket. Nobody at the Pinball Hall of Fame gets paid. That's rule number one. Well, the hippie gets paid, but not by the Pinball Hall of Fame. Right, he gets paid by me. Out of your pocket, every week, you cut the hippie a little money. Yeah. And you're providing him room and board. Right. And he works for you. Yeah. And so it's just you and him at the Pinball Hall of Fame, seven days a week, 11 a.m. He volunteers to help out. He gets two days a week off, and I get one day a week off. Okay. And you have locals that help you, local guys? And I could get locals in there seven days a week, but the problem is they don't know how to fix anything. and if we stop fixing games for even a couple days, we'll come back and half the games will be broken. We've just been overwhelmed with repairs on this project. What do you mean? I haven't been able to do much promotion. I haven't been able to get, you know, I wanted to do T-shirts and a whole line of memorabilia, you know, merchandise you could buy. I haven't had time because every day two or three games catch on fire. Okay, this is a slight shift in gears, but I want to go back in time a little bit to when you had photo booths that you were running at Pinball Pete's in Lansing. Tell me about your photo booths. Well, it's not so much the photo booth. It was the collection of pornographic photo booth pictures that I entrusted to the hippie when I left in 1990. Now, nobody seems to know where they went. Now, what do you mean pornographic pictures? I mean, imagine a body part, and then imagine another body part, and imagine something you could do with those two body parts, and we have a picture of it. Because what would happen? Well, how did you get these pictures? We would open up the photo booth, and there they would be. So, basically, a guy and his gal would go on the... Or a guy and a guy. Or a guy and a guy? Or a guy and a goat. You know, whatever you want. So they would end up in your photo booth? Right. and they would put... We kept this locked in the office in this special little collection, and somehow or other it got lost or stolen. I don't have it anymore. So people would come in with, you know, two guys, or a guy and a girl, would come in and they would, you know, be hugging and kissing or whatever, and put money into the machine to get the picture, and the picture would get jammed. Yeah. And you didn't, like, subconsciously try and hoard these? No, but when we changed the photochemicals, there'd be some in the bottom. And, you know, every fifth one would have something weird. Something weird. The only thing they have left is the infamous memo from the head office. What's that? The head office. So you can fill in the rest. Sorry, just had to throw that in because I knew about that collection and nobody could find it. The hippie lost it. Oh, God. Okay, poor hippie, you know. That's bad. That hippie. Okay, so anyway, now we're back to the Mall Hall of Fame. Sorry, I had to shift the gears. What we need to do is get people to come to Vegas. And when they're in Vegas, they should come to the museum and experience it. because there's no guarantee that this is going to be here forever. At some point, our lease is going to run out, I'm going to get too old to do this, or I'm just going to get sick of working seven days a week. Whatever is going to happen is going to happen. And I remember telling people every time I had a fun night, you know, you better get in and do this fun night now, because it's not always going to be here. And it wasn't. It's the same thing with the pinball out of faith. How long did you do the fun nights for? Seven or eight years. Seven or eight years, twice a year. Twice a year. And what was the most number of people that you ever had? We had 460 show up. 460. And I heard Joe Kimiko, the guy that ran Data East, showed up in a Batmobile. Showed up in a Batmobile. Right. Now, what do you think of Joe? Joe's a goof. I like goofs. I like weirdos. I understand the people that worked for Joe weren't nearly as upbeat. Well, I never worked with a guy, so I guess my relationship was perfect. I said hi to him, he said hi to me. And he was a good donator when he came into the Salvation Army to give him money at Fun Night? I don't really know because I wasn't selling tickets that night. Okay, okay. So he shows up in the Batmobile, he's a goof. What other goofy guys showed up at Pinball? The real highlight for me was when three generations of Gottlieb showed up at the same night. We have Alvin Gottlieb, the son of Dave Gottlieb, who's now in his 80s, show up with the grandson, Mike Gottlieb, and the great-grandsons. Three of them were running around out in the yard. I was talking to Mike Gottlieb, and Alvin was wandering through the shed looking at games he hadn't seen in 30, 40, 50 years. His attitude was, I walked out of the factory the last day, and I haven't thought of it since. And here he is, you know, reliving it again. And then we had a slideshow of the Gottlieb factory tour that nobody had seen yet. And we put a sheet up, and we actually showed him pictures of the factory in 1972. And you've got to remember, this is a guy that designed that factory from the ground up to be steel coming in one end and pinballs going out the other. He literally designed the flow of this factory to be efficient and modern for the first time. So he looked at the pictures and he would see people in the background sitting at their desks and he could identify them by name. So that was pretty damn cool to see all those Gottliebs in one spot at one time. Okay. Now, how does your woman in your life feel about this whole... Charlotte's been absolutely great. She's on board with the whole thing? No, she doesn't like it. But, you know, she's never been a pinhead. But you've got to remember, I never came into this as a collector. I came into this as an operator. And everything we have is because of him. And I get some slack because of the charitable nature of what we do. So, you know, that automatically gets me some slack there. Let's talk about bowling balls. Bowling balls are great. Let's talk about the bowling ball pyramid that lives in the side of your house. How many bowling balls do you own? A couple thousand. And why do you own a couple thousand bowling balls? Because I was bored and I like round things. Where did they come from? Salvation Army stores, thrift stores. You could drop them off. Okay. And you would buy them? All these clothes, and I buy them after 50 cents a piece. From the Salvation Army? Yeah. You figured it just was a donation. You give them a buck or whatever for a bowling ball. Yeah, they give me a bowling ball. And then you pile them up on the side of your house in a giant pyramid. How tall is the pyramid? It's going to be 18 feet when it's done. 18 feet. 18 feet pyramid of multicolored bowling balls. And if you look in the webcam, you'll see a picture of it back. I took that picture, I would say, in probably the late 90s, and it's grown probably much larger than this. So you've got, you know, thousands of bowling balls stacked up. Yeah. Okay, good. I just wanted to cover the bowling ball. Let's talk about Al Warner's pins and vids. Pins and vids. Let's talk about that. How does he help in the pinball hall of fame? This is another perfect example of people that just help out. Again, the charitable nature of what we do really helps us because people like Big Al just come up with these projects and do all the work, and then we get to reap the rewards. Let's talk about this old pinball. Me and Norm made this top number one back, I think it was in 2000. You stole every idea you've ever had. Thank you. You stole the idea for this old pinball from this old house. Yep. You stole your logo from the Jerky Boys. Yep. You stole the idea of selling the videos from me. Oh, okay. Wait, wait, wait. You stole the podcast idea from Apple Tunes or whatever the hell invented that. Okay, well, let's talk about this. In 2000, me and Norm get together as a gag to rib on you. Yeah. Because what is your nickname? Shaggy. And when was that nickname coined for Tim Arnold? It has to do with Scooby-Doo. Right. Tim Arnold, who we're talking to right now, Pinball Hall of Fame Tim Arnold, his nickname is Shaggy. So in the year 2000, me and Norm get together, and we do a gag video, a two-hour video, a restoration of a World's Fair, 1964 Gottlieb World's Fair. And we videotape the whole thing, and we show it at the Fall 2000 Pinball Expo. And we just imagined it as a one-time show. We show it there. Everybody laughs. Everybody loves it because we're making fun of Tim Arnold the whole time. And we're restoring pinball machines, and people loved it. Then you come up to me at the show and you say what? You son of a bitch, you stole my idea. And you say, give me that master and I will copy it and sell it to Pinheads for six bucks. And that six bucks will go to the Salvation Army. Well, this is right at the start of the building for it too. Right. That's when we change from giving it all away to retaining it. Right. So then, you know, and I asked Norm, and Norm says, fine, so we give you the master at the show. You start selling our video, and we see nothing for this. No. And you're just hoarding all this six bucks. Right. Getting rich on it. Right. And giving some to the Salvation Army. And me and Norm are okay. And Norm and I just continue making these videos, sending these masters to you, and you just keep selling them and putting the money into the building farm and giving some to the Salvation Army. This was when we were on VHS. Right, VHS. Four discs. Right. And I would do repairs. I would go out and do repairs for $100 to $150 and go to Sam's Club and buy tapes at $0.79 a piece. Right. With the repair money. And then I would duplicate them. I had like six VHS decks hooked together. And I'd duplicate them and then paste a cover on top of the VHS box and wrap them in butcher paper and send them out book rate. It was about as low rent as you could get. But again, for six bucks, that's all you're going to get. Randy Fromm was selling a series of how to fix your games, and he was getting, what, 50 bucks a tape? Yeah, something like that. Something like that, yeah. So we decided to take the downtown and dirty route and just sell them for six bucks. Because part of the plan was always that it's not just a fundraiser, it's about the education. The more people that feel comfortable fixing this stuff, the more people are going to collect them. Right. And we also kept the goofiness in it because one thing we noticed about Randy Farm's tapes is they get boring real quick. Oh, yeah. God, I can't watch that. It's like if I can't sleep at night, I put a Randy Farm tape in, and it's like instant sleep. You know, I can't. The guy just sets a video camera up in the back of his classroom and just runs it, and that's a Randy Farm tape. There's no boobies and there's no fire. There's no boobies, no fires, no blowing up anything, no candy, no dandy, no chicks with bowling balls, no polishing shooter rods, no cleaning top glasses with females' upper anatomy. None of that. There's no fun in a Randy Fom tape. Not that I need to rag on Randy Fom. I mean, he's a great guy and everything, but his tapes just suck. Well, it's worked out good. Yeah, it's worked out good. So, anything else that, you know, we need to wrap this up. We've been going an hour and a half here. Yeah. And you need to get to the Pinball Hall of Fame to give Hippie a break, right? Well, no, we've got a volunteer. Hippie had the door off today. Oh, he did? Okay. So you need to go up there and relieve the volunteer. So, now, how do you see, how long do you think you can keep doing this? Well, I'm committed to a lease. My name personally is on the lease. For how long? Two years, ten months. Three years, basically. Okay, three years. At the end of the three years, I would like to say we had enough money to buy a building. Or, if we want to, we could re-up our lease. We might have to pay a little more, because he's under no obligation to continue the deal past the end of the lease. And at that point, we're just going to have to make up our minds. And again, if you're planning to see this amazing collection, you'd better do it now. Soon. Because there's no economic reason for this museum to exist. it doesn't really pull its weight when you figure out all the time and effort that everybody's put into it. And in America, very few things last very long that aren't economic. Right. So get your ass on an airplane, get a $79 flight, take your family to Vegas, let them hang out by the pool, and you can come on over and play pinball. There you go. All right, Tim, well, I want to thank you again for this interview with Tim Arnold. A special night of TopCast with Tim Arnold. Tim, thanks a lot. You take care. And have a good night. Right. Okay. Goodbye, Tim. _(Acquisition: groq_whisper, Enrichment: v4)_ --- *Exported from Journalist Tool on 2026-04-13 | Item ID: 53046264-0c17-439a-92d0-797bcdee1706*