# Episode 376 - Interview with Steve Young 8-7-16

**Source:** For Amusement Only EM and Bingo Pinball Podcast  
**Type:** podcast_episode  
**Published:** 2016-08-11  
**Duration:** 92m 42s  
**Beat:** Pinball

**URL:** https://foramusementonly.libsyn.com/episode-376-interview-with-steve-young-8-7-16

---

## Analysis

Steve Young from Pinball Resource discusses his 40+ year journey in pinball, from college player to parts supplier and historian. He covers his IBM career, early game importing and restoration work, the founding of Pinball Resource through necessity, his extensive Gottlieb archive (36,000 blueprints), serial number collecting efforts, and his deep appreciation for 1950s woodrail games, particularly Gottlieb and Williams titles.

### Key Claims

- [HIGH] Steve Young has 36,000 blueprints covering Gottlieb part numbers from 1 to closure in 1995, representing 10,000 pounds of paper — _Steve Young directly states this in the interview, describing his archival collection_
- [HIGH] Gottlieb part numbering system encodes the type of part (01=stamping, 02=turned metal, 03=molded plastic, assembly=different number) — _Steve Young explains the part numbering methodology based on drawing sizes and part categories_
- [MEDIUM] Williams manufactured approximately one-third the quantity of games that Gottlieb did during the woodrail era — _Steve Young estimates Williams production as roughly 500-700 units when Gottlieb made 1,000-1,500, based on collector experience_
- [HIGH] Pinball Resource was named by Dennis O'Dell, the Pinball Trader magazine publisher — _Steve Young credits Dennis O'Dell for suggesting the name 'Pinball Resource' during their collaboration_
- [HIGH] Steve Young's first pinball game was Williams Cabaret, played in his college residence hall around 1974 — _Direct account of his introduction to pinball during junior year of college_
- [HIGH] Early EM multiplayer games suffer from objective reset frustration when one player lights but doesn't collect a feature — _Steve Young describes the mechanical limitation of multiplayer EM design and its gameplay drawbacks_
- [HIGH] Williams' 8-Ball (1966) experimentally featured dual playfield banks for true two-player simultaneous play — _Steve Young cites this as an exception to multiplayer design limitations, noting Steve Kordak rejected the approach due to cost_
- [HIGH] Some Gottlieb games were produced as samples/tests but never commercially released (Ten Little Indians, Route 66, Bush League, Ricochet) — _Steve Young references production records and his archive; notes Bush League was found by Silvers_
- [MEDIUM] Steve Young collected over 200 games at his peak and has sold approximately half since around 2009-2010 — _He mentions reducing his collection after his collecting partner John Federman retired_
- [HIGH] Gottlieb games in the 1950s used letter and number serial combinations, later adding letters to differentiate models, starting from number 1000 in the 1970s — _Steve Young explains the evolution of Gottlieb serial numbering practices based on his archive research_

### Notable Quotes

> "I was an American Pinball fan and didn't quite understand it and it took me a while to play pinball and I guess I caught the bug from there."
> — **Steve Young**, early in interview
> _Describes his entry into pinball despite growing up in 'a poor pinball state' (New York)_

> "I took a cut in pay from operating pinballs to work for IBM."
> — **Steve Young**, mid-interview
> _Illustrates the tension between his pinball passion and career necessity_

> "Dennis said hey you're a real pinball resource and it stuck."
> — **Steve Young**, discussing Pinball Resource naming
> _Origin story of how Pinball Resource got its name_

> "I could make a career out of just contributing information. There's lots of people. There's a lot of people who have a hobby and don't research the information that's available."
> — **Steve Young**, discussing documentation gaps
> _Reflects on the lack of consolidated pinball knowledge and accessibility_

> "Whatever I'm playing at the time... Isn't that how a wine collector says, what's your favorite wine? They go, oh, the one that's in my glass."
> — **Steve Young**, discussing favorite games
> _Demonstrates his pragmatic, historian's approach to game appreciation_

> "The storage never improved anything."
> — **Steve Young**, discussing Casey Jones restoration
> _Captures the reality of long-term game storage and its effects_

> "It's very frustrating... you have to start all over to light it up again and then you lose your ball but don't get the advantage of it."
> — **Steve Young**, discussing multiplayer EM drawbacks
> _Technical explanation of why early EM multiplayer games were flawed from a gameplay perspective_

> "Just storing the games is not what I wanted... I simply made a decision based on how much space I could devote, what I thought I could accomplish."
> — **Steve Young**, discussing collection focus on woodrails
> _Explains his strategic shift to focus on 1950s Gottlieb woodrails rather than broader collecting_

> "The factories were, their lips were sealed... Either for competitive reasons or whatever."
> — **Steve Young**, discussing serial number collecting
> _Notes the historical secrecy of manufacturers about production data_

> "Williams only made about a third of what Gottlieb did... when we found a Williams woodrail, we were actually happier than when we found a Gottlieb woodrail because they were that much harder to find."
> — **Steve Young**, discussing collecting rarity
> _Illustrates how production volume affects collector experience and rarity perception_

### Entities

| Name | Type | Context |
|------|------|---------|
| Steve Young | person | Founder of Pinball Resource, IBM employee (1976-onwards), pinball restorer, historian, and collector with 36,000 Gottlieb blueprints |
| Pinball Resource | company | Parts supplier and mail-order business founded by Steve Young in the late 1970s to serve restoration needs unmet by commercial distributors |
| Dennis O'Dell | person | Pinball Trader magazine publisher who named Pinball Resource and collaborated with Steve Young |
| Gordon Hasse | person | Introduced Steve Young to popular culture aspects of pinball in the late 1970s; source of games for his collection |
| John Federman | person | Steve Young's collecting partner who retired from collecting ~6-7 years before interview (circa 2009-2010) |
| Gottlieb | company | Major pinball manufacturer; focus of Steve Young's archival work and collection specialization |
| Williams | company | Pinball manufacturer producing approximately one-third the volume of Gottlieb; known for woodrail games |
| Don Murphy | person | Chicago-based pinball person involved with Steve Young in early manufacturing of parts Pinball Resource couldn't obtain commercially |
| Irving Brian Morris Sales | company | New Jersey-based Gottlieb distributor in the 1970s; primarily served commercial operators, not retail |
| WICO | company | Parts supplier Steve Young attempted to use in the 1970s |
| Knoebels | organization | Park where John Federman worked and where Steve Young and Federman stored games during their collection partnership |
| Wayne Morgan | person | Organizer of traveling pinball exhibit at Regina Public Library in Saskatchewan, Canada |
| Larry Beise | person | Took over serial number collection effort from Steve Young; later passed it to online database maintainers |
| Silvers | person | Restorer who located and repaired Bush League, a rare Gottlieb game |
| Harry Mabs | person | Gottlieb designer who moved to Williams in late 1940s; influenced Steve Young's appreciation for Williams games |
| George Melentyn | person | Williams artist; designed artwork for games Harry Mabs created at Williams |
| Steve Kordak | person | Bally/Williams decision-maker who rejected the 8-Ball dual-playfield design as too costly |
| Nicholas Backbone | person | Host of 'For Amusement Only EM and Bingo Pinball Podcast'; conducted this interview |
| Silver Ball | product | Publication or project Steve Young was involved with during his IBM era |
| RLM Amusements | company | Organization Steve Young was involved with during the 1970s-1980s |
| Pinball Collectors Quarterly | product | Magazine published by Steve Young and collaborators in the 1980s; still available as reprints and back issues |

### Topics

- **Primary:** Pinball Resource founding and business model, Gottlieb archival collection and documentation, Early EM and woodrail game design and mechanics, Pinball restoration and parts sourcing, Multiplayer game design limitations in EM era
- **Secondary:** Serial number collecting and production data research, Williams vs. Gottlieb manufacturing volumes and rarity, Pinball history and industry evolution

### Sentiment

**Positive** (0.82) — Steve Young speaks with deep affection for pinball history and his role as a preservationist. He expresses gratitude for the community and passion for his work. Mild frustration is evident regarding multiplayer EM design flaws and the historical secrecy of manufacturers, but this is presented as technical observation rather than bitterness. Overall tone is nostalgic, educational, and warm.

### Signals

- **[historical_signal]** Steve Young maintains 36,000 Gottlieb blueprints (10,000 pounds of paper) covering the full span of Gottlieb production through 1995 closure, representing a unique primary historical archive (confidence: high) — Direct statement: 'I'm sitting here with a gallery of archives here. There's 36,000 blueprints here. That's part number one to when they closed in 1995. That's 10,000 pounds of paper sitting in filing cabinets.'
- **[design_philosophy]** EM multiplayer games suffered from fundamental design flaws where one player could disrupt another's progression by lighting and collecting shared objectives, limiting competitive engagement (confidence: high) — Detailed technical explanation of why Player 2 could reset lit features intended for Player 1, creating frustration and requiring feature re-lighting; cited as major drawback compared to single-player design
- **[manufacturing_signal]** Williams produced approximately one-third the volume of Gottlieb games during the woodrail era (500-700 vs 1,000-1,500 units), making Williams games significantly rarer in collections (confidence: medium) — Steve Young: 'Williams only made about a third of what Gottlieb did... when we found a Williams woodrail, we were actually happier than when we found a Gottlieb woodrail because they were that much harder to find.'
- **[restoration_signal]** In the 1970s, commercial parts distributors like Irving Brian Morris Sales and WICO were unfriendly to retail customers, creating demand that led to Pinball Resource's founding (confidence: high) — Steve Young: 'They were really set up for the commercial guys to buy stuff and they weren't very friendly to the guy off the street. I found I couldn't get the parts that I needed.'
- **[machine_intel]** Gottlieb production records document several games that may be extinct or extremely rare: Ten Little Indians, Route 66, Bush League (one found by Silvers), and Ricochet (production photo exists but no known surviving example) (confidence: high) — Steve Young cites Gottlieb bills, materials, and folders to confirm some games were produced as samples/tests but either never released commercially or have not survived
- **[industry_signal]** Pinball manufacturers in the mid-20th century kept production data confidential, preventing easy determination of how many games were made or serial number ranges (confidence: high) — Steve Young: 'The factories were, their lips were sealed... Either for competitive reasons or whatever.'
- **[design_innovation]** Williams' 8-Ball (1966) experimentally used dual playfield banks to allow true two-player simultaneous play with independent objectives, but the design was rejected as too costly to repeat (confidence: high) — Steve Young describes 8-Ball as doubling the control banks/steppers, creating 'basically two single players in one machine,' citing Steve Kordak's decision that 'it costs too much, we'll never do that again'
- **[content_signal]** Steve Young collaborated with Dennis O'Dell on Pinball Trader magazine and Pinball Collectors Quarterly in the 1980s, contributing photography and editorial work while maintaining his day job at IBM (confidence: high) — Mentioned publications and interview reference from 1989 Pinball Trader; Young confirms 'I did the photography. I had local people that were contributing.'
- **[collector_signal]** Steve Young strategically shifted from broad collecting (200+ games) to focused 1950s Gottlieb woodrail specialization, selling off approximately half his collection due to space constraints and desire for meaningful documentation rather than storage (confidence: high) — Young describes downsizing from 200+ games to ~100 and deciding to 'concentrate on Gottlieb because of the amount of information that I had,' focusing on 1950-1955 games
- **[restoration_signal]** Steve Young established a systematic restoration process with one game 'under the knife' at any given time, achieving approximately one complete restoration per month despite limited availability of work time (confidence: medium) — Young: 'I made room in my shop so that there's one game under the knife all the time... I've been getting about a game done a month.'
- **[technology_signal]** Introduction of memory in solid-state games (Bally's Strikes and Spares era) eliminated the multiplayer objective reset problem by enabling independent game states for each player, fundamentally changing multiplayer game design (confidence: high) — Steve Young: 'It isn't until you get to like Strikes and Spares where Bally put memory in... your objectives change. So the disadvantage kind of disappears at that point.'

---

## Transcript

 What's that sound? It's 4 Amusement Only, the EM and Bingo Pinball Podcast. Welcome back to 4 Amusement Only. This is Nicholas Baldridge. Tonight I have a very special guest, Steve Young from the Pinball Resource. Steve has worked very diligently over many years Over many years to bring us high quality reproduction parts and to stock those necessary items for pinball maintenance and restoration. Steve was kind enough to take time out and speak with me about a variety of topics. I hope you enjoy. Good afternoon Steve, how are you? Hey, good afternoon, how are you? I'm doing well. Well let's get started with just a little about you. How did you come into pinball? I was introduced to pinball probably my junior year in college by a couple of friends that I bummed around with. And prior to that point I had no recollection or no interaction with pinball having grown up in New York which is kind of a poor pinball state. I was a pinball fan and didn't quite understand it and it took me a while to play pinball and I guess I caught the bug from there. Do you remember the first game that you played? It's a Williams game, Cabaret. Alright. Alright. Now is that one that you ended up owning later on? No. Cabaret was in the residence hall that we were living in and was being operated by someone who had the concession to put the games in that particular residence hall. Excellent. So a lot of college students playing the game obviously. How did it hold up? I mean, did you end up playing that through your senior year as well? No, these games rotated. They didn't rotate them as often as they should. When we took over the concession, then you started to realize the value of rotating equipment and so forth. So you brought fresh games to people and people weren't, you know, they didn't understand the game fully. So it took a while for them to DR. ANDY Jim Weisz trains for my picturesDid you just drop D him a picture of your purchased pinball policete rk I was in probably senior year when this particular student graduated. So he sold the concession for a dollar which was the nominal fee and then these two friends of mine operated it and then and that's where we kind of you know we rented the equipment. They rented the equipment and along with that came the keys so that we could start sticking our noses in them and start fiddling around with things. John Papadiuk, Black Water, person's name or role at Stern Pinball), or John Papadiuk, Black Water, person's name or role at Stern Pinball), or – adore That's a very good skill set to have. So what did you do for IBM? I started with IBM in 1976 with a master's degree. I took a cut and pay from operating pinballs to work for IBM. And I went to work in what was called multi-level ceramic where they were screening metallurgical inks on unfired ceramics and then stacking them up to make large modules that held up to like 120 integrated pieces. And one of my name in the chat is everything from the they said back by father. Tuane vuigny,leadingárias nieceacter trench下次, Hi Bill.ào So, explain to me how you got into becoming the pinball resource in more than just the shop that you run, but in general as well. I mean, you're the guy to call for information, all kinds of very useful information. So, how did that happen kind of simultaneously with what was going on with your day job? Well, I'll answer the question, but you may have to ask the question More than once because it's kind of a lot of different facets and they kind of come together. Okay When I graduated from college I went to work for IBM Then I started to import games from Pennsylvania to do home sales So I've wanted to keep my hand in pinball. Oh, by the way, I had a hundred games in my collection by then. Wow So, I wasn't really separated from pinball, but I liked the extra income that I got from doing that. I like to keep my hands involved and so forth. So, I brought games from Pennsylvania up here because I was kind of a replay snob. New York State is an edible state, so I thought replay pinball is better than edible pinball, and I know that'll cause all kinds of I'm not a consternation in the community, but that was my belief at the time. And therefore, my source of games was John Fetterman's people and people he knew down in Pennsylvania. So I used to go down there and haul back six or eight games at a time in my pickup truck. And that was my source of games. Well, I kind of outstripped that. I couldn't get enough games howd門ari reasoning This very daily calls the I'm sorry I don't have any calls to you. So, I don't like easy way to create a little bit of a monopoly in your local area. At the same time you know my understanding of pinball and everything you know changing and so forth so in a home I realized that the advantages that I thought winning a free game Mr. Sidney also I kinda got my head wrapped around that. So you warmed up to attaballs? I became accepting of attaball and an advocate of all pinball I don't advocate one over the other but it's all pinball so it's all good. So I have that going on and sometime in the late seventies that's when I met Gordon Hasse and Gordon I was kind of introduced me more so to the popular culture part of pinball. So you got a different aspect than just operating or fixing. And we had become aware of things like the traveling pinball exhibition that Wayne Morgan put on at the Regina Public Library up in Saskatchewan, Canada. And I was kind of getting into, you know, the popular culture part of pinball. I was doing that while I still worked at IBM. I was busy, boy. Sounds like it. So, you're restoring games, you're doing silver ball amusements, pinball collectors quarterly, and you're working your day job. Right. Boy, that's quite a bit. So, during this time, that was about the time of the EM to solid state transition. What were your thoughts at the time on that transition? Not really much of a thought wise. The games that I was buying for resale were starting to get into the early Gottlieb System 1 games and the early Bally 6800 series games. So I was beginning to learn how to work on those kinds of machines as kind of a necessity. But we were for a home use There wasn't much of an advantage to go into solid state versus electromechanical. I used to explain to customers that a properly reconditioned machine, whether it was electromechanical or solid state, would be reliable in their house. Right. And while the cost of maintaining or fixing a solid state machine would be about double the cost of maintaining electromechanical game, you would probably see me as half as often. So on the whole it would average out. I used to figure out, I used to tell people and I believe from my calculations that if they dropped a penny and a quarter and a cup every time they pressed the start button, Man 2 Man x6 Knapp, chk, jei cox, guy x2 poz, sin, and Knapp, gir Annie Knapp, hat sz present leer Jei, re salivazy Atimore, games require more time involved in the game usually require more work. Or finish the discussion of Pinball resource, I found it difficult to purchase parts to repair the games that I was reconditioning. I went to normal places like Wico and I would deal with, I think it was Irving Morris Sales at the time down in New Jersey who was a Gottlieb distributor. They were really set up for the commercial guys to buy stuff and they weren't very friendly to the guy off the street. I found I couldn't get the parts that I needed or I needed stuff I was buying more parts, and then the operators that I was buying the games from, they would call me up. Oh, I need a flipper coil for such and such. Do you have it? Yeah. Can I come get it? Sure, come on over. So they started buying parts for me. Mm-hmm. Because they didn't invest, you know, typical operator, they didn't, they invested in the game and then kind of ignored it, and then they react to crises. So I'm like, I can't believe you guys. You guys, livelihood depends on the game running and you have no parts. So I scratched my head and I kept buying parts. And then I got involved with people like Don Murphy in Chicago and so forth and we decided that we would start making stuff that we couldn't get. So we started to do that. We started to advertise and Dennis totals and more trader magazine and tennis is actually the one who gave us today oh excellent gave me the name that is dennis said hey you're a real pinball resource and it stuck what do you know so it's a small hobbyist world here well i mean the number of people that were in the hobby at the time was I've been selling parts and doing mail order stuff since the late 70s, using a typewriter and packing stuff in my free time and helping people out that way. That's incredible. So, I was reading actually an interview that you did in an issue of Dennis O'Dell's Pinball Trader and... Oh, that must have been a long time ago. 1989. So, you had mentioned the Pinball Collectors Quarterly and it's something that I've read about in the past and I've never asked you about this when I've called before, All right, well we got plenty more before, but is that something that you still sell? Jan Zantac, Birds uhh. Wesley Brantner, John Papadiuk, Black Water, person's name or role at Stern Pinball), or Mikeep Kaniyamidze records Mark었는데, We stopped the magazine, sent everybody their money back that had sent their money in, and started selling other things like a couple of catalog reprints and back issues of the magazine. And then we made a little bit of money. The print runs were decent. You have to run a certain number of copies and so forth. So, issue one we had a pretty good run on because we mailed some of those out as a gimme. Here's a magazine, here's what it looks like, do you want to subscribe and so forth. Jonathan Wiltlings I still read them and I'm proud of what we did. I'll be ordering a set here soon. You're chief cook and bottle washer. You're doing all the work to maintain the list. You're mailing the stuff out. You're getting the permits from the post office. I did the photography. I had local people that were Josh P caracter McGann Really P Richard Ch 이� Britney funny part drawn on screen Jenny Atomicffective.com So uh... in that interview you had mentioned that the definitive repair manual still hadn't been written and uh... you were considering doing something about that is that something that you're still considering uh... uh... I don't know off and on There were a number of efforts that have been done to gather a lot of information together into either books or today online. I could make a career out of just contributing information. And yet I see lots of people There's a lot of people who have a hobby and don't research the information that's available. They go out on a news group or some kind of electronic medium and they just ask a question, ìHow do I fix this?î Then they say, ìOh that's covered over here, how do I fix this?î ìHow do I fix that?î They don't go look at the sources that are out there. I'm a very good and getting better by the day. If I had nothing else to do, I could just document pinball. There's that much that's not documented or pulled together. Yeah, it's fascinating to think about, you know, especially with the proliferation of all these digital sources, like you say, that there's that much. But you're right. I mean, a lot of people don't... This was a major industry. If you look at the quantity of games that were made, and you look at, you know, this was not a hobby. People made big businesses out of this. You look at the production quantities, you look at the quantities of games that were being made per day, and it's astounding. Absolutely. You know, you look at it, I look at, you know, I'm sitting here with a galley of archives here. There's 36,000 blueprints here. That's part number one to when they closed in 1995. That's 10,000 pounds of paper sitting in filing cabinets. Every from A-sized drawing up to F-sized drawings that, you know, cover a wall. Just to digitize all that stuff would be a career. Yeah. Stuff was all done, you know, up until the late 70s, everything was on paper and pencil. That's where the letters come from in your part numbers. Right. You know, a part number beginning with an A is on a piece of 8.5x11 paper, which is called an A-sized drawing.れる Ave, The Great makes clever debate golundark Phillip playbooks Started out with you know 1A you know and they put into the part number they put in the type of part it was So a 1 which became 01 once they digitized a 1 is a stamping When you done with it it just a stamping You done with it If it an 02 it was a turned metal part It not an assembly it a turned metal part So if it comes out of the lathe and it you know you might plate it or whatever It's done. That's an O2 part. And an O3 part was a molded plastic part. So it popped out of the mold, you're done with it. If you had to stamp it or attach something to it, then it became an assembly and it got a different kind of a number. But by knowing how the number is assigned, you can know something about the part. Data East has the same thing. 545 is molded plastic part. principal should be fives. Interesting. That's very helpful. It took a long time to figure that out. I mean it sounds so simple today. Well, when you explained it to me, yeah. But yeah, that's something you know in looking at parts catalogs I've never even picked up on. Right, you know motors are categorized under this number. You know, Gottlieb didn't do that. They just put straight part numbers. So the part number in a Gottlieb doesn't tell you anything about the part except to go get the drawing and see what it is. Other people did things differently. Do you have any insight as to why Gottlieb might not have set theirs up that way? No. No? Okay. Fair enough. They did it the way they did it. Somebody else thought about it differently, and they didn't copy anything. They did it a different way. Alley did it another way. I only had a method and you just followed the method. Fair enough. And once you set things kind of up in concrete, you kind of don't mess with them. Right. I've got part numbers here that I assigned back in, you know, 92 when I started to computerize and I got the number wrong. I got the letter in front of the part wrong. Guess what? I can't delete it. We just live with it. We know that that part starting with a C starts with an A when you talk with Pinball Resource. That's, oops, but it's kind of cast in concrete. Yeah, I mean, once it's done, I guess it's done. So, well, going back a ways, what was the first game that you picked up for your own collection? What are the first two games I bought? One was a Williams Palisades and one was a United game that I don't remember sitting here. I bought them when I was a senior in college. I bought them with my friend's help. I had, you know, senior year you could have a car so I had a station wagon and we could become a little bit dangerous. And, um, John helped me fix the game. It turned out somebody had swapped the transformer from one into the other and vice versa. So the only thing wrong with the Palisades was the fact that it had the wrong transformer in it, therefore the wrong voltage. So when I went out to the car where the other game was and I took the transformer out of it, we put it back the way it was I was supposed to be presto change-out, got a working game. I stuck it in a section lounge. Seven balls for a nickel because it was a 1951 or 2 game and this was 1974 so it wasn't the most modern machine and I was killing it with nickels. I was nicking into their business downstairs. It almost caused a war. I still have Palisades. I would have to go back to my card file and tell you what the other game was, but the other game is not in my collection anymore. Gotcha. In that interview, a lot of my notes come from that. You mentioned that Four Corners is one of your favorites, and that game is particularly interesting to me. The game is integrated with both the artwork and the concept. If you get three in a line or four in a line, you get a fair number of replays. In the end, the blueprints is just an image that shows the four corners in the grid, you get 20 replays. It's got artwork showing you the four corners in a bucolic scene. It's a really interesting tie between the object of the game and the artwork on the machine. I think that game is particularly beautiful. I recently, I haven't been buying many, I've been trying to dwindle my collection, but locally I was offered William's Disc Jockey, which is the next game. And it's also got, I'll call it a bingo card in the corner. I think it's smaller, I think it's one row narrower or whatever. And that game, Very similar, but has a very interesting come on. In this time period you see Gottlieb had the double award where if you put a second nickel in you could double your awards. Right. This game, if you accomplish a reasonably simple goal on the playfield, the light comes on and says double award next game. So after you finish the game and you got that light lit, you're going to be reaching into your pocket for another nickel because now you're playing a double and you only paid for a single. Interesting. I just think that's a very novel approach too. Fishing that extra nickel out. Play again. And cough up some more change. What are your thoughts on Hong Kong, which was another in that series? It's a good game. I have had only pieces of a Hong Kong. I don't think I've ever had a complete game. Whatever I've had, I've sold. What's the oldest game that you've repaired? What are some of the items that you have bought or restored in your time collecting? I have a Red Graves Parlor Bagatelle which is what 1870 something. I've had two of them. Bought at different times. I sold one. I have one that's, I think, in Jersey City that's different than the Philadelphia or whatever the other label was. Came in a box, you know, a wooden box, a hinged cover box. I bought it at an auction. I've had it a lot of years. I've been playing pinball for years. I've worked on 30s games and so forth. I understand them historically and I have an appreciation that they helped us get to where we are. But my real interest is after we got flippers in 47, 48. You have a beautiful wood rail collection. What are some of your favorite players from that era? Whatever I'm playing at the time. Isn't that how a wine collector says, what's your favorite wine? They go, oh, the one that's in my glass. Yeah. I haven't played them all. And I've been discovering them. I've either played them a long time ago and don't remember them. I'm a fan of the pinball. I've played them a couple of times. I don't remember how they played or I haven't played them at all. And in the process of restoring them, I get a chance to live with the game and play it a while before I put it in the row and then work on the next one. Couple of years ago, I decided that I better get busy and start restoring some of my games. So I started, I made room in my shop so that there's one game under the knife all times. The time to work on it a little bit here and a little bit there. You got a couple of hours and you work on it. I've been getting about a game done a month. Now I run out of space to set them up. I find all of them have something interesting on them. What I find interesting The only thing about the 50s games is because it was really a time of experimentation and kind of rapid development of play mechanics and features on playfields and things like that. So some of these games have things that work and some things that they tried once and don't work. But that's one of the, that plus the artwork and everything is why I really concentrate I've been collecting in the 1950s and the games that I've been restoring in the first half of the 1950s. So I've been really concentrating on 1950, 51, 52, 53, 54 and 55 kind of games. Now I run out of space and I don't know how I'm going to approach it. I have to pick my battles. I'm currently working on It's a game I play when I get it from Gordon. It kind of works and I then set it on end in my garage for the next 30 years and now it doesn't work and I have to go through it. The storage never improved anything. It's funny how that works. But I've got set up and really like Casey Jones and I like Crossroads and I like Chinatown and I like Coronation and I like Queen of Hearts and Flying High and I've got a Pokerface set up that I really enjoy and I've got Pinwheel up, I've got Green Pastures up, I'm a fan of the tough game. Lovely Lucy, mystic marvel, jockeyclub, I got a whole bunch of games set up. Some of them are very tough games to play, but you can see from the wear on them they got played. So people like those games. Whether I like them or not, I don't know. That's part of the fun of restoration, right? Right. Yeah, you get to understand how the features work and how one game might have led to the other and they did certain things for a certain while and then they changed. Yeah, that's the beauty of looking at it. It helps me answer a lot of questions. Somebody calls, I'm working on such and such, oh yeah, I just did one of those, what do you want to know? Well, I'm wondering if such and such, oh yeah, it works this way and I get to, you know, I don't remember, I'll go look at my game and tell you. Well, that's excellent. So, what are your thoughts on multiplayer games? In general, I don't like them. With EMs specifically? Is there... Yeah, it's an EM thing and it has to do with a number of things. Number one, in In their earliest manifestation, when player one turns some kind of feature on it but didn't collect it, player two, who might be the poorest pinball player in the world, can collect that bonus or collect that hundred point bumper and then shut it off for you. So you have to start all over to light it up again and then you lose your ball but don't get the advantage of it and then they collect it again. It's very frustrating. So that's one of the drawbacks. The major drawback to an electromechanical multiplayer is that the objective of the game has to be simple enough to achieve it in a different environment. When you play a single player game, you have five balls to work toward an objective. The objective tends to be more complex or you have multiple objectives. When you have a multiplayer game, you know, light A, B and C for extra ball. That's it. Or instead of getting 15 drop targets down, you need to get one bank or the other bank down and then some feature lights up. And then you lose the ball and the game resets and you get to do that simple objective all over again. The game is a single-player game, with a more complex objective. There are exceptions to this. Williams tried a game called 8-Ball in 1966, where they put a double bank in the game. If you ever pick one of those games up, your arms will fall out of your sockets. It's basically two single players in one tab. Each player then has their own five-ball game to get the objective. They did it, I think, as an experiment. Steve Kordak says, it costs too much, we'll never do that again. Yeah, I can believe that, doubling all the steppers. Yeah. Well, it doesn't double the steppers, it doubles the bank that's keeping control, you know, keeping track of your pool rack or, you know. Yeah, your trip bank. And so forth. Right. Um, and you had that in your first solid state games. It isn't until you get to like Strikes and Spares where Bally put memory in. So the playfield from that point on becomes four single player games in one cabinet. So then you, your, your, your objectives change. So the disadvantage kind of disappears at that point. Yeah, the other, the other, I don't, the other thing that I have going, comment that I have going against multiplayer games is that if you get four guys to play pinball on a game that's got four players, one of them is always invariably better than the other three. And you're waiting for your turn. Somebody is going to be a hog. Not intentionally, but they're going to, you know, you lose interest. You're standing around Jim Hill §ничigtal wife chen »History neighborhoods So when people talk to you about what should I get, I find you can talk to them about pinball like this, but you can also say, well, if you bought a, like a shuffle alley, you know, you're throwing one or two pucks very rapidly. And the rotation of the players happens to keep everybody's interest in a con in a competitive mode. Cause you're playing, you know, nobody can monopolize the game. If you throw one puck and get a strike, your turns up. Knapp, the next player. If you throw a second puck to get your spare, you know, it still doesn't take long. So you haven't lost that competitive nature and you haven't lost people's attention. John Papadiuk, Black Water, person's name or role at Stern Pinball), or I'm going to get a feel old here. You had mentioned that you're collecting serial numbers. Is that something that you're still doing personally? No, I turned that over. When I approached things, I was raised in a house collecting I've always had a historical approach to things. To understand how things are today, to look back and see. And one of the questions that we always had was how many of each game was made. And no one would tell you. The factories were, their lips were sealed. For whatever reasons they wouldn't release production data. Either for competitive reasons or whatever. So one of the ways we thought we could get to the bottom of that is to start collecting and then start doing additions and subtractions and get an idea of range of serial numbers and also you get from that you get survivorship you know you had an idea that they made a thousand games and you've got so many games reported you obviously don't have everything reported and you can start looking I'm a big fan of the pinball, and I've been playing other games and seeing how many might be out there and how many may have survived. I did it for quite a few years and I turned it over to Larry Beise. Can't tell you the year. Larry carried it forward and then Larry, I think, turned it over to the people that do it online. So some of that information ended up on the online serial database. It gave us an idea but we never could get enough information. This is the days before the internet. What you gathered was people writing you notes or telling you over the phone, sending you a fax or something like that. What we could never determine is where a serial number might have started. Did Gottlieb go to the next thousand number or did they start a certain game with... We know that in the 70s they started with serial number 1000. They never started with serial number 1. Well, it takes you a while to figure out. You don't have any serial numbers below 1000, so they must have started at 1000, 1001, 1002. In the 50s they had letter and number combinations and they added letters after a while, so each model number got a different letter, but the serial numbers were somewhat contiguous, 1419 This process has encouraged the blogging point and the pilot extensions. 15os shaftity PageMario Ten-year-old symphonicues Instagram Media iris industry 17 staan at the live thing oops 15osכשיו or the indica insisted thank you happy through current between 52 So, one of the concepts that you mentioned there was survivorship. And in the interview you also mentioned extinct machines. Are there some titles that you know or that you suspect at least off the top of your head that might be extinct games? There are extinct games. When I looked at the Gottlieb serial Number Base or their production list, you see games that weren't produced. Like Ten Little Indians or Route 66 or they made a little baseball game called Bush League. There was another one called Ricochet. I have a production photo of Ricochet. I know that they made one game. Did it ever show up in anybody's basement or collection? I don't know. Bush League or Silvers found one. He said, I know what it didn't make and it doesn't work right. He made it work to the best of what it did when it was new for his customer. But they didn't keep the project I a fan of the game profile You know all the bills and material and everything that I got I can tell you what parts are in what game and so forth but where the game wasn issued they don have a folder So at some point they tossed it out or at some point they decided we not going to preserve a record of what we didn make And I sure the same is for Williams as well I just I don know it as intimately There are games that were made that they made some samples of and tested it and said no it not going to fly Don't make it. For whatever reason that they had. Or we have something better we want to do, forget about it. Steve, when most people think of you, they think Gottlieb. You're kind of synonymous with Gottlieb parts and so forth. whoard source, CASIO four-person android intentionally,플 arqu식bungy, and maneuvers chatter Kha encouraged- ie ng fünfpyn brethren CAM,N talking time for an internetżenieört мел tscyčne spielencs playing normal永ฅè Teaplýč Nintendo Now hospital or tsof수� jejćňćŏne-étaisitters So I'm a collector. My collecting partner. John Federman and I, when we closed the business from operating at school, when I graduated with my master's degree, John went back to work at the park up at Knoepels. He and I had a number of games in our collection together and we decided to keep that going. That survived until about six or seven years ago when John decided that he wanted to retire from collecting. So at that point I bought him out and moved the games to New York that were in storage down in Pennsylvania and I put heads and bases together and made some tough decisions about I'm a fan of the game. I was on the high side of 200 games at that point. I have sold off about half of that. A little here and a little there quietly. Games as is, you know, restored and so forth. I made a decision to concentrate on Gottlieb because of I'm not sure what the amount of information that I had, but at that point when I made that decision, I had about half of a 50s Williams. We used to rejoice when we found a Williams wood rail because Williams only made about a third of what Gottlieb did. So the numbers, you know, if Gottlieb was making 1,000, 1,500 games, 850, 1,400, you know, This is making $500, $350, $700. So there are fewer games to start with, there are fewer games to find. So when we found a Williams Wood Rail, we were actually happier than when we found a Gottlieb Woodrail because they were that much harder to find. So I have a great appreciation for Williams Woodrails. Harry Mabs, who was designing at Gottlieb went to Williams in the late 40s and the games that he designed for Williams would have been the ones he would have made for Gottlieb because it was him the designer. I have a real appreciation for the games of that time period. The art was different, but it was different. It was George Melentyn doing the artwork instead of Parker, but it was still great art. The game is very interesting. I simply made a decision based on how much space I could devote, what I thought I could accomplish. Just storing the games is not what I wanted. The 60s games that I owned in my collection, I still have a Slick Chick and a couple other I'm a fan of the 60s games. They've been sold off except for the slick chick. I just gravitated toward the wood rail games. So my involvement in the 60s was more for buy and sell, recondition, than it was to keep. There are some terrific Williams, almost all the inverted wedge head Williams games are fantastic. Destroy Papadiuk has a silly introduction for a F Inclusive steroids monster figures episode in which I'm a big fan of pinball and I've played pinball in my circles. We never found a lot of ballet 60s games. There was that huge gap where they were only producing bingos. They only made three or four games in the 50s. They re-entered the business in 1962 or about then. That was their re-entry into pinball. The first game was a copy of a Gottlieb game. And, you know, you find they just never ran in the circles that I was running in. If you kind of stop and analyze patterns, I always look for patterns, you'll find, let's say you're in the middle of Wisconsin in a town that's a hundred miles from everything else and you're driving around and you see everybody in this town driving around I was a Ford. You kind of go, my God, why is that? Well there's only one car dealer in town, it was a Ford dealer. And if you wanted to buy a Chevy you had to go 100 miles. So people didn't do that. We have the same kind of thing with the distributors. The distributors that distributed pinball games many times financed the operators. So if you had a strong distributor, that distributor could get a lot of product out because he was lending money to the operators so they'd buy his equipment. So if you had a distributor that was dominant in a certain market, you'd see a lot of games like that in that area. You see, for instance, in Michigan, you see lots of Stern, classic Stern games because There was a large distributor that supported that brand. You had the same kind of stuff, like say in Philadelphia, where you had just, you know, giant, godly distributor and they kind of owned that town. I don't think I've ever collected games in an area that was, maybe had a strong valley distributor so I never got a chance to buy a lot of valley games. Makes perfect sense. Does that kind of make sense? Oh yeah, yeah, that makes perfect sense. You know, it's like you hear about United Games down in Lake George. Well, there's a big distributor of United Games down in Georgia. We don't. You know, you play a United game and you kind of go, oh yeah, they kind of like all play alike. And they aren't very interesting to play because they didn't have lots of different features and a lot of them have almost the same playfield layout. But people in that area, you know, that was what they knew. Coz they had that was there Jitske strong distributor was, okay, you're not a distributor. Yeah, and that's uh... that's an interesting concept to with United and and also with Bentley and in some of the games that they made where they they did a lot more similar than different and I wonder if the theory was that players would be less confused or I don't think they ever got that deep. I don't think the distributor ever got that deep. Well, not the distributor but the manufacturer. No, I don't know. You kind of play to where your strengths are, I think. You know, you We watched, you know, like Capcom tried to break into the pinball business in the mid-90s and they had a real problem that you couldn't find a good distributor. If somebody took on the brand, the game was in the back room and wasn't up front. Or Williams, you know, Williams was going through one of these things where they didn't want their distributors to handle anybody else's games. Well, Williams is the dominant distributor out on the street. And they just said, hey, you guys can't carry Gottlieb or you can't carry Stern or you can't carry Capcom. You just relegated anybody trying to start out to a secondary distributorship that doesn't have the infrastructure built up. And that was going on. Yeah. Yeah. There was only one distributor that managed to keep Williams in another brand. I think that was in Baltimore. The and he told Williams no. But a lot of distributors, you know, decided that, you know, they were, they liked Williams and they liked their relationship with Williams, so they kind of de-emphasized or dropped the other brands. Well, yeah, it's hard to... Williams wanted to be exclusive. You know, they want to own the market, so... There's a lot of, there's a lot of very interesting The pinball industry is a place where you can learn about the history of pinball, not just the making of games and the play development and so forth, but the business of pinball. That's something I know nothing about. That was something I had hoped when we did the pinball encyclopedias with Dick Bushell. That was, see Dick was an industrial historian. Appreciation for all kinds of stuff but an industrial historian. And he was digging into that kind of stuff and I had hoped that we would have been able to finish that set of volumes to be able to present that stuff. And I would have read them to learn what I could learn. I mean the stuff that I'm sure he would tell me that I didn't know. Maybe someday that'll happen. We have all his records. Well that's good. But putting pen to paper on a project like that is a lifetime of work. Yeah, it's daunting probably to say the least. Yeah, and it's not a job you can, oh I got five minutes. No, you can't do that. You gotta get your head, you gotta go someplace for a week and not have the phone or the internet or whatever bother you and you gotta put your, you gotta immerse yourself in it. So, Steve, just out of curiosity, what do you think of the resurgence of pinball as a hobby from the digital perspective? There's a lot of people that play the pinball arcade. Arcade, which has licensed Gottlieb tables in it. What are your thoughts on that as kind of a gateway to actual pinball? Well, there's lots of gateways to pinball. I don't think the hobby has ever subsided. I have seen the hobby grow continuously regardless of how the business was doing commercially. I've seen the hobby grow continuously every year that I can be aware of, that I have a business measure of. Let's put it that way. There's new people that pop up and some of them go on to own one game and that's it. Some people become addicted and own 50 games and some people become promoters of shows and go on to give back to pinball that way. Some people find another aspect of the hobby and maybe they become manufacturers of a game. I'm a fan of the game. Not everyone who comes to the hobby develops the same way. I can remember working with people hours on the phone, teaching them how to read schematics. And then finally the light bulb goes on and they catch fire. And that person went on I've been to run a very successful show for 17 or 18 years and benefited pinball by making it more popular and you know it was great. I didn't help him I didn't help him read schematics so that he could turn into a good show promoter. I helped him because he needed to know. I've helped other people on the phone for hours and they fix one game and they're done with pinball. That's the luck of the draw. Now do you have anything to do with the approval process for those digital recreations? No. Okay. That's Gottlieb. I'm a humble licensee of Gottlieb. Right. With the, you know, in the exclusive area of parts and remaking parts. I had a lot of fun playing pinball. And if I wanted to make a game I'd have to go back to them and get my license expanded. And if I wanted to do something like, you know, hats or mugs, you know, or digital or whatever, I would have to go and expand my license. Gotcha. I think it all adds to the enjoyment of pinball. I mean, people played some of the early computer pinball games and decided they wanted to play the hardware. I'm a hardware guy. I'm not a software kind of guy brain. I'm a nuts and bolts kind of guy. Some people call us gearheads. I'm into making stuff and making stuff work and that's my interest. Perspective 1 With the software all day, so getting to work with the hardware at Pinball is my relaxation. That's my favorite thing to do. I have a quick story for you. One of the first times I called you up, just as an example of what a resource you are, I'm a fan of the game. One of the first times I called you up, just as an example of what a resource you are, I called you up and said, I'm working on this game and I've troubleshot this problem and I think I need this part. And you told me very quickly, no you don't. And you said, go back and look at it again because I'm not always right. But it's not my first rodeo in many years. Exactly. Yeah. And so I just wanted to put that story out there because it shows just what a great resource you are. Picking up the phone and being able to talk to you, present you with the parts that you need and then you know your interest is not in purely you know moving a bunch of parts. Your interest is in keeping machines alive. Yeah I have to, I have one of the more, one of the questions I've learned to ask and it's not just in pinball but in life is what problem are you trying to solve? CoreyNDenYair, I'm a fan of the pinball, and I, yes, I don't sell certain parts because they don't need them, but I think from a business standpoint and a hobby standpoint, it's the right thing to do. Right. I would rather put the extra energy up front. Say you don't need that flipper coil, you need to go look at your end of stroke switch, or you need to look at the return spring, maybe you don't need any parts, than it is That's the way it is to sell somebody a part that you have doubt about and then they call you up in three days when they got your packet and it didn't solve the problem I want to send it back. I can't base my business on other people's lack of knowledge. That's something I can't do. So I invest that extra time. It takes people to, it takes people to back a little bit. They gotta get over that hump. They hang up the phone and go, he wouldn't help. Yeah, I helped you. Go look at it again. Yeah. And now and then they'll call you the next day and now the doubts out of it, you're right. I need this. You're That's what I suspected. Okay, let's get you set up with that. And oh, you probably need this too. Yeah, how did you know? Well, I just know. All right, but I've avoided trouble. It's kind of like measuring twice and cutting once. Right. I'm not going to take advantage of when they need something and I act as a backstop. They need something. They know that I have their best interest in mind. I think that's important. I agree. And it's different than the way the world seems to work today. Yes. But I work the old fashioned way and that's the way I work. And we try to, you know, when I see a problem looming I try to avoid the problem if I can. I had people call me up and say I have, you know, such and such a problem and I go oh yeah that came, and I look at about the third relay back on the right, it's labeled such and such and look for such and such. Ten minutes later that person's back on the phone. Cursing a blue stream. I said, what's the matter? He goes, I worked on that for two weeks and you fixed it in ten seconds. I said, yeah, I know. Sorry. But I learned from you. I learned the same thing. I get people, I work through a problem with them on the phone, I go, I don't know if I got it or not. Would you call me back and tell me what it was? So I kind of, I learned from that. A lot of customers, you'll hear from them, you know, they won't call you in an hour and say, it was this. I was working on such and such. It turned out that you didn't give me the right answer, but you led me in the right direction, so the problem turned out to be this. I said, oh, good. Okay. I can start that away in my memory bank. The next time somebody has that problem, I can give them maybe two options. One of them is right. Yeah, that's... So, you know, I learn every day. I get to teach and I get to learn. I just think that's the best thing in the world. Otherwise I get bored. I gotta keep doing new things. We take on new challenges, we make new parts. We take on new processes. We take on new problems. You kinda gotta move forward or you stand in place. So, um, we're talking about parts and pinball resource on your website which is pbresource.com and I'll put that in the notes for anybody who might need that and hasn't called Steve. There's a news page which lists some of the new parts that you make once they come to market and those Bally spring kits for steppers, thank you for making those. Well, you're welcome. It's a scatter shot. I like to be precise, but ballet is kind of difficult to work with as a company, as a manufacturer. They were concentrated, you know, they came from, let's say, arcade roots and bingo roots where they were really focusing on Batt note, stopped, up싸chnuke glasses EnterUs, Other явan K gaprava, The very difficult because they brought that mindset with drop out so you could cheat the game they designed it so that all the relays would drop at the same time. So you might have a series of five or six different coils and they might be different by let's say 50 or 100 turns. But if you go to a pinball machine where you don't need that kind of protection, those coils might all be interchangeable for a pinball application and yet they all have different part numbers. And you have the same thing with their springs, I think. I kind of studied a lot of parts catalogs and I looked at a lot of spring numbers and I tried to select a few springs that would cover the basis. Because I think to put the five or six springs together that I needed to do those kits is probably around $3,000 worth of springs. My cost. And you know I got boxes of them all. I got to store them. Mm-hmm. I go to a spring manufacturer. I can't Tell them well give me a hundred of this spring They throw me out. Right. So We have to do some kind of quantity and I had to do some approximation. So I hoped that I provide enough and I think that is the basis to work around what we provide. I can't afford space wise and business wise to make every spring ballet used. There's hundreds. Same thing for any of the manufacturers. These guys were pretty good. You know, Gottlieb especially was very very good about not reinventing the wheel. If they had something that worked, they stayed with it. They stayed with it. mtv 60 they use it up to make a change to use it up made a running change but they use it up they documenteditude made a change but they you took up to get throwing away okay I would imagine other manufacturers do same yeah they might have approved something and Apart number changes haha all why we will都是 I can go to a Gottlieb print and I can see the record of changes on a print. You know, they changed the plating or they changed the tolerance or they changed this. I can guess at why they made a change, but I don't know all the answers. I don't know what the feedback from the field was. I don't know what complaints were coming back through the distributors and so forth. So there's a record of change where someone signed off on it? Well, any manufacturer does that. It's called an engineering Change Level. Okay. Alright, but if you go to a Gottlieber or anybody's print, in addition to the print, there's a series of boxes in the usually lower left hand corner where they list the changes, Clone topl掰掰 at the down and a makes itめて this particular Kevin Hart I have also here boxes of what they call record prints. And I haven't really digested them, but the recordprints are the marked Up print that then became the later print. And if I look at the recordprint, I might find additional answers as to why something was changed. I have that level of documentation for Gottlieb. I can only imagine that any of these manufacturers that were controlling their process had an equal documentation trail as to what they were doing and why. These guys were running businesses. It was not a hobby for Bally to make stuff. If they couldn't make money out of it, they didn't stay in business. Same thing with Williams. Same thing with Stern. Any of the manufacturers. Sure. The level of documentation is astounding. I'm impressed. Well, that's good. That speaks to a well-run operation. Oh yeah. And the piece that I don't have, and I never will probably have, is I don't In all the documentation I've got, I don't have their business documentation. I don't have what did it cost to make a game, how much were we selling it to the distributor for, how much was it retailing for. That stuff is still something we don't have and I don't know if it exists. So, my comments are really on the technical side of the business, not the business side of the business. Right. Yeah. So the Gottlieb archives didn't have the ledgers and so forth that did all that? Well, I wouldn't expect them to be, and I don't know that they would want to share that with me. Yeah. Yeah. It took me... Well, the original Gottlieb parts came here in about 97 or 98, And it took me till two years ago to get my hands on the archives. You know, I had to kind of convince them and they had to, you know, they had to decide they wanted, they weren't using them. You know, I had access. If I needed, you know, information from a print or a buy card that I didn't have, you know, someone would get it for me and send me a photo or a fax of what I needed so I could get to I'm a manufacturer or start something, you know, get a part quoted or whatever. But actually having the drawings here is much easier. And it took me until a couple years ago to actually get them. So have you seen a speed up in turnaround on new parts production and those kind of things? Well, it makes my life easier. I still have to decide whether the part's economical to remake. You know, it costs a lot of money to do an injection mold. It costs a lot of money to make a quantity of any kind of part. While any part is possible, not every part is probable. Right. There's an awful lot of parts in a game. And so that's one of the other reasons why we're on the phone a lot of times is we're finding an equivalent that will work for something. You know, if Gottlieb made a coil with a brass sleeve in it and they had one part number and then they renumbered all their coils in the late 50s when they went to a nylon bobbin, does that mean I got a supply to part under both part numbers? I don't think so. Right. They're interchangeable. If I'm making a 5141 flipper coil, do I really have to go make some with a label on it that says 1546, which was the earlier version but it's identical? Key cardinaler manual نحجر Marspekte chased Где I'm a fan of the old coil. They want their game to look old. You know, they want the old coil. I understand that. But that has to unfortunately become a nicety instead of a requirement. If I have an old coil and you want one, I'd be happy to sell it to you. But to go out and get a different color label and to print the part number on the part a little bit differently and so forth Glucose Photoנס, South hole beyond Fres hospital de facto sanity Mil Окal. Mundopop !! Knapp Carp wanting the Kanpản I'm a little building blocks. You know, people call up and I want to, I had somebody call me up recently. He wanted to buy a shooter assembly for a Williams game. I said, why? Well, the ball won't go far up. I said, what have you done? Well, I haven't done anything. I just want to buy a new shooter assembly. He said, well, I think you need about a sixty-cent sleeve. And, are your springs okay? Yeah, springs look alright. I said, well, How about a 60 cent sleeve instead of a $28 shooter assembly? He hadn't thought about it. He's a new, I'll use the word kid, new guy who's obviously in his twenties and he likes to replace things. Drives me crazy. If it's not broken or worn out. Not broken, it's rebuildable. Yeah, but we also run into lots of people, it's available, I want it. Well, I only got three of them left. If you buy that and you don't need it, someone is going to call me up and they need the whole assembly because it's been missing. If you can fix your game for a few pennies, it would be nice if you leave it on the shelf in consideration for somebody who really needs that part. Because nobody's ever going to make this Assembly again. I happen to have three of them because I got lucky. And yeah, it takes up space on a shelf, but somebody is going to need that whole assembly because it's missing from their game. And I'm going to say, I've got one for you. Because somebody left it there. But that's not today's mentality. If I can replace it, I want it. I have trouble with that. I hear you. I'd make more money if people would just replace everything. That'd be great. Well, sure, yeah. But I'm trying to think about the long-term viability of pinball. People are going to be maintaining these games for many years. People are going to need this. And people are digging up games that have more and more wrong with them. The easy pickings are gone. Every game is a project game now because all the good stuff has been collected already. So the quality of what you start with for your repair is less than it was, let's say, ten years ago or even five years ago. Games that should have been, you know, taken out in the back forty and buried or served as a source of repair parts for other games, people are trying to restore. Repainting playfields and repainting cabinets, stuff that we would never have even dreamed of doing. Games worn out. Give it a break. It's parts for the next game. No, these are being brought back from the dead today. And I appreciate that, it's great. Mhm. But those games are no longer donors of parts, they're requireers of parts, and they tend to require more parts because they're in more worn out condition. Yeah. We've kind of brushed over bingos, and I'm just curious what your thoughts are on bingos in general, Knapp, what effect they had on pinball? I appreciate bingos and I appreciate what was done with them, but as a pinball collector, I don't have a very warm spot in my heart for them. I don't think there's a lot of skill compared to flipper games, although people that play bingos will disagree with me and Seedling. That's fine. They have presented real legal challenges to flipper pinballs, especially in the fifties. They had almost crossed flipper pinballs their lives. So I think from that standpoint I'm not enamored with bingo games. That's my personal feeling. It's not everybody's. Sure. I respect people who want to collect them. Thisacey Sp isotl bumps. They're painting the, well they're the kind of thing, I mean I heard Don Hooker give a presentation at one of the early pinball expos. The complexity of a bingo is so great that the only way you can test them is with a machine. You can walk up to a you know, a mid-sixties Gottlieb or Williams or Bally pinball machine and you can play it and you can see whether it works. I'm going to be able to do this, look for this, check for that. You can become an inspector for a pinball company pretty quick. Drop coins into, does this work, does that work? You have a checklist, it's a very short checklist. Run a ball, does it keep score, ba ba ba, okay good enough, out the door. That's not the same for bingo. They have such intricate payout schemes and so forth. You can't possibly test them out. They have to have machines to test machine. And it's just like working on slot machines. Once you understand how slot machines work, you understand that it's never in the player's advantage to be playing a slot machine. If the house is working on a 2% pay, the more money you put in, the more money the house makes. You get 2% of every dollar that's put in the game in the machine. Yep. I used to restore mechanical thought machines back in the 70s under the cloak of darkness. They weren't legal here yet, you know, and once you understand how they work and everything and how easily you can change the payouts and how you can add a bug or plug a hole, you know, make this little adjustment, you lose all respect for I'm not saying that they're not the best players in the world, but I'm saying that they're not the best players in the world. I mean, you go to Las Vegas and you find slot machines in the men's room, you know exactly what they want from you. They want your money. That's fine. They're not hiding anything. I'm fine with that. But to sit there and play them for hours and hours and hours and hope to win is not likely to happen. You couldn't build a business on that. They have to make money. You're not in it for the goodness of their heart. True. Pinball resource is not a public service. We have to make money to pay salaries and pay overhead and rent and utilities and phone and health plans and all kinds of stuff like that. I can't sell the park for what the park cost me. Right. That's, you know, everybody knows that. You can accept that. I don't keep it a secret. Same idea. Steve, best way to get a hold of you if people need parts is via the phone. 845-473-7114, correct? That's correct. And we do a lot of email the same way. Jimmy's on our email and he has kind of the same philosophy. We try to catch the bigger problems and straighten them out. If it's something beyond the scope of email then customers are told to please call and talk to Steve. You got a motor to be rebuilt, you know, you got to talk it through. It's best to do it that way. So we have, you know, telephone traffic for that reason too. All these kinds of things. It's a great way to get your order set and send it in. I work on machines after work hours, so I do a lot by email with Jimmy. It works great for time-shifting overseas, too. Cotte D Guessmann I believe it. Yup. We did it. It took a couple tries. So this was an actual incident. Oh yes, it happened rather recently. And then it generated an email that I then had to filter and say no, no, no, that's not what we talked about. So I, you know, but it took a couple of passes. I gotcha. I still remember when we printed the Pinball Collectors Quarterly and I ran PinballResource and the magazine, everything all out of my house. Right? And somebody got their magazine in the UK and they called me up and I answered the phone and it was 3 o'clock in the morning. They didn't even think about where they were calling. You know, okay. But that's, you know, that doesn't happen anymore because I don't live here. So, aside from that people can fax as well. Yeah, we still have a fax machine. A lot of people seem to be taking them out, but we have a fax machine that's rather busy, so a lot of our suppliers need taxes. Yeah, I work with insurance, and so we're one of those industries that still has a lot of fax going on. Now you don't want somebody to tell you on the phone or leave a voicemail to do something. Right. Yup. So that's good. And we get orders written longhand in the mail. Really? I had one this week. Please send me this back glass off your specials list. Okay. Huh. Yeah. That's the way that person prefers to order. That's really cool. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Fill the order and send the back glass out. No problem. So you take all comers is what you're saying. Carrier pigeons all kinds. Most office knows how to get here. Most of the carriers are here on a almost daily basis. That's good. We get all the mail. We're in a multi-tenant building so we get mail for everybody and if they don't know where it goes it comes to me. So I get everybody's mail. We get your mail if you mail it. Thank you for your patronage and thank you for doing what you're doing because I think I'm a fan of your recording stories and things that will encourage other people to keep pinball in their heart. People call me up on the phone and their fathers and they're teaching their kid how to work on a game or their daughter is now two or three and they're teaching them how to play and so forth. These people are what are going to keep pinball alive for future generations. You can use this to play with your pinball. It's not a blip on a screen. That's kind of what makes pinball unique. I hope it stays around for a long time. Me as well. Well, thank you very much Steve for your time. I greatly appreciate it. You're welcome Nick. My pleasure. I'll be talking with you soon. I'm going to order that run of Pinball Collector's Quotes from you. I'll be out there in a few days. I'll be back soon. Thank you. I think you'll enjoy them. I think I will too. Thanks again and I'll put this contact information for Pinball Resource in the show notes so people will be able to look that up in case they don't know it already, which I'm sure most people do. Great, thanks a lot. Well, thank you. I want to thank my guest Steve Young for coming on the show. Be sure to go to pbresource.com for more information and some of the common parts that they carry, as well as some oddball stuff that they may have from time to time. As I mentioned in the interview, their contact info is going to be in the show notes. And that's all for tonight. Thank you very much for joining me. My name again is Nick Baldrige. You can reach me at 4amusementonlypodcast at gmail.com or you can call me on the bingos line. 724-BINGOS1 724-246-4671 You can listen to us on iTunes, Stitcher, Pocket Casts,via RSS, on Facebook, on Twitter at bingopodcast, you can follow me on Instagram also at bingopodcast, or you can listen to us on our website which is foramusementonly.libsyn.com. Thank you very much for listening and I'll talk to you next time.

_(Acquisition: groq_whisper, Enrichment: v3)_

---

*Exported from Journalist Tool on 2026-04-13 | Item ID: b4c67c72-8acc-41db-8411-52346e4c7075*