# Joe Newhart - Pinball Expo 2023 - Pinball News **Source:** Pinball News (Pinball Expo 2023) **Type:** video **Published:** 2023-10-20 **Duration:** 45m 26s **Beat:** Pinball **URL:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OAU6LOFU9Bc --- ## Analysis Joe Newhart, founder of Pinball Star Amusements, delivers a personal history seminar at Pinball Expo 2023 tracing his journey from casual pinball enthusiast to major distributor and extreme collector. He recounts how his son's medical condition inspired his entry into pinball, his evolution as a collector across multiple eras of machines, his partnership with Jersey Jack Pinball founder Jack Guarneri, and his charitable efforts donating Wizard of Oz machines to hospitals. Newhart emphasizes the importance of being a good steward to the hobby, educating new players, and building genuine relationships rather than just pursuing sales. ### Key Claims - [HIGH] Jersey Jack Pinball's entry into the market in 2011 triggered the resurgence of pinball and competition that forced Stern to innovate, leading to the emergence of boutique manufacturers like Spooky, American Pinball, and Pinball Brothers. — _Joe Newhart attributed the growth directly to Jack Guarneri: 'I attribute Jack Guarneri to starting the resurgence of pinball and the boutique companies that came after him...prior to that, there was no competition to Stern...when someone new came in the market, they had to up their game'_ - [HIGH] Newhart was the first distributor for Spooky Pinball and remains their largest distributor. — _Newhart states: 'I was the first distributor for Spooky Pinball. Whenever we market Spooky Pinball, I'm always proud to say that I was their first and still their largest distributor.'_ - [HIGH] Jack Guarneri (Jersey Jack Pinball founder) proactively replaced Newhart's damaged NASCAR cabinet at no charge as a customer service gesture, setting an example of distributor responsibility. — _Newhart received an unsolicited replacement cabinet from Stern/JJP after complaining about minor damage, and Guarneri explained: 'you weren't happy, and that's important to me that the customers are satisfied...it was my responsibility to make it right for you'_ - [HIGH] Newhart donated five Wizard of Oz pinball machines to hospitals (St. Christopher's, CHOP, Papa in Pittsburgh) and later partnered with Project Pinball to donate two additional machines in NYC and North Carolina. — _Newhart recounts running tournaments and setting aside profits to purchase 'five Wizard of Oz machines that I donated to St. Christopher's Hospital in Philadelphia' and partnering with Project Pinball to place two more in NYC and North Carolina_ - [HIGH] Newhart's collection grew from 3 machines to over 120 machines across multiple eras, requiring him to rent commercial office building space and eventually purchase a church. — _Newhart states: 'My collection that started with three games became 20, became 40, became 80, became 120. And soon enough, I had games of every era...I ended up purchasing a church for two purposes, to house my business, Pinball Star Amusements...and also to house my collection'_ - [HIGH] Newhart's son Patrick became a better pinball player than him by age 13, which motivated his competitive engagement with the hobby. — _Newhart states: 'When he was about 13, he became a better pinball player than me, constantly beating me...it's not fun not being able to beat him anymore'_ - [HIGH] Charlie Emery of Spooky Pinball prioritized keeping game prices low ($6,000-$6,500) over hiring employees, despite Newhart's suggestions to increase prices. — _Newhart recalls: 'him and I had had arguments over time where I would always tell him, I think you should charge a little bit more and then put that money back into the company to hire employees, and he always wanted to keep the price point at $6,000, $6,500'_ - [HIGH] Newhart's aggressive marketing at Pinball Expo 2012/2013 included distributing labeled water bottles and door hangers throughout the hotel, resulting in his first sale from a Chicago customer who saw the flyer. — _Newhart describes distributing 50 cases of labeled water bottles and walking every hotel floor placing door hangers, leading to his first sale: 'My phone rang...some guy I didn't know from Chicago said, Oh, I saw your flyer...I want to purchase a Wizard of Oz'_ - [HIGH] Newhart's son Taylor was born with mild cerebral palsy, and a therapist suggested pinball as a therapeutic activity for leg muscle stretching post-surgery around 2002. — _Newhart recounts: 'Taylor was born with a mild form of cerebral palsy...his therapist said...you need to find something that he'll do to stand upright for a long period of time...off the cuff, his therapist suggested maybe an arcade machine or a pinball machine'_ - [HIGH] Newhart's distributorship began as a casual side business but evolved into selling thousands of machines worth millions of dollars over the years. — _Newhart states: 'I was thinking this was just going to be a small little side business for myself that I would have fun with, and it's grown into a business where I sell, you know, over the years I've sold thousands of games, millions of dollars worth of pinball machines'_ ### Notable Quotes > "I'm the guy that you always tell your wife that when maybe your wife complains that you're buying an extra pinball machine, if she does that, that I'm the guy that you point to and say, well, at least I'm not him because I can't stop." > — **Joe Newhart**, early in seminar > _Sets tone for Newhart's self-aware identity as an extreme collector and illustrates the community recognition of his obsessive collecting habits_ > "you weren't happy, and that's important to me that the customers are satisfied, whether or not Stern paid for it or whoever's fault it was, it was my responsibility to make it right for you." > — **Jack Guarneri (Jersey Jack Pinball founder, quoted by Newhart)**, mid-seminar > _Exemplifies customer service philosophy that influenced Newhart's own approach to distribution and became a foundational principle for his business_ > "I attribute Jack Guarneri to starting the resurgence of pinball and the boutique companies that came after him...prior to that, there was no competition to Stern, and they frankly just weren't doing that." > — **Joe Newhart**, mid-seminar > _Positions Jersey Jack Pinball as the catalyst for the modern boutique pinball renaissance, directly crediting one person/company for industry-wide transformation_ > "I love talking to new people in the hobby, and I'll spend time with them. And a lot of times, I'll never ask for a sale. I'm just trying to educate them about what's out there." > — **Joe Newhart**, late seminar > _Encapsulates Newhart's philosophy of community stewardship over transactional sales, reflecting a broader ethos of mentorship in the pinball community_ > "If somebody doesn't like pinball that bought their first machine and spent $10,000 on them, they're not going to buy number two. So I always want to make sure that they love what they buy." > — **Joe Newhart**, late seminar > _Reveals the business logic underpinning Newhart's customer education approach—long-term market growth depends on genuine customer satisfaction_ > "Where did this thing live before I had it? Was it in a smoky bar? Was it in a bowling alley? And I always loved having, you know, on pinball machines, maybe burn marks on the wood rails in somebody's cigarette. To me, that's like history." > — **Joe Newhart**, mid-seminar > _Illustrates the collector's appreciation for pinball machine provenance and historical artifacts, reflecting a romanticized connection to pinball's commercial past_ > "Michelle's shaking her head too because there's nights that she's like...she calls these guys that I text all the time that we just joke back and forth or talk pinball. She calls them my pinball girlfriends." > — **Joe Newhart**, late seminar > _Provides humorous insight into the time commitment and social intensity of Newhart's pinball industry involvement, and the impact on his personal relationships_ > "I was the first distributor for Spooky Pinball. Whenever we market Spooky Pinball, I'm always proud to say that I was their first and still their largest distributor." > — **Joe Newhart**, mid-late seminar > _Establishes Newhart's early recognition of boutique manufacturer potential and his role as a key enabler of Spooky Pinball's market success_ > "It's a lot of money. It's a lot of hard work. It's a lot of physical work. It's a lot of sleepless nights and then tearing down and bringing everything home and unpacking everything." > — **Joe Newhart**, late seminar > _Provides candid assessment of the hidden labor costs of running a distributorship booth at major shows, often uncompensated_ > "I always try to spend time with a newbie that calls me to purchase their pinball machine they always say I don't know anything about them...and I know I'm going to be on the phone for an hour." > — **Joe Newhart**, late seminar > _Demonstrates commitment to community education and onboarding of new players, even at personal time cost_ ### Entities | Name | Type | Context | |------|------|---------| | Joe Newhart | person | Founder of Pinball Star Amusements distributorship, extreme collector, and speaker at Pinball Expo 2023 seminar | | Jack Guarneri | person | Founder of Jersey Jack Pinball, former pinball distributor, credited by Newhart as catalyst for the modern pinball resurgence | | Charlie Emery | person | Founder/operator of Spooky Pinball, known for prioritizing affordable pricing over aggressive growth | | Rob Burke | person | Organizer of Pinball Expo, invited Newhart to speak at the 2023 seminar | | Patrick Newhart | person | Joe Newhart's son, became a competitive pinball player and travel companion to pinball shows starting in childhood | | Taylor Newhart | person | Joe Newhart's other son, born with mild cerebral palsy; his therapeutic needs inspired Joe's entry into pinball | | Michelle Newhart | person | Joe Newhart's wife, supportive of his pinball hobby and business despite time commitments | | Chris Hutchins | person | Owner of High-End Pins pinball restoration company, early collaborator with Newhart in game restoration | | Dan Spoiler | person | Founder/organizer of Project Pinball, nonprofit focused on placing pinball machines in children's hospitals | | Brad Baker | person | Operator of Pinball Garage in Ohio and VP Cavs (virtual pinball company), collaborator and friend of Newhart's | | Pinball Star Amusements | company | Distributorship founded by Joe Newhart, distributor for Jersey Jack Pinball, Spooky Pinball, and other manufacturers | | Jersey Jack Pinball | company | Boutique pinball manufacturer founded by Jack Guarneri in 2011, credited with triggering the modern pinball resurgence | | Spooky Pinball | company | Boutique pinball manufacturer founded by Charlie Emery, distributed exclusively by Pinball Star for approximately 5 years | | Stern Pinball | company | Major pinball manufacturer, mentioned as dominant competitor prior to Jersey Jack Pinball's entry | | St. Christopher's Hospital | organization | Children's hospital in Philadelphia where Joe Newhart's son received treatment; recipient of donated Wizard of Oz pinball machines | | Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) | organization | Children's hospital that received a Wizard of Oz pinball machine donation via Newhart customer partnership | | Project Pinball | organization | Nonprofit organization placing pinball machines in children's hospitals; received Wizard of Oz machine donations from Newhart | | Pinball Expo | event | Annual pinball conference/show held in Chicago organized by Rob Burke, venue for Newhart's 2023 seminar | | Papa | organization | Pinball tournament venue in Pittsburgh where Newhart ran tournaments and donated a Wizard of Oz machine | | American Pinball | company | Boutique pinball manufacturer mentioned as emerging competitor post-Jersey Jack | | Pinball Brothers | company | Boutique pinball manufacturer mentioned as emerging competitor post-Jersey Jack | | Dutch Pinball | company | Boutique pinball manufacturer mentioned as emerging competitor post-Jersey Jack | | Mike Pesak | person | Rob Burke's partner at Pinball Expo, confronted Newhart about unauthorized hotel door hangers marketing | | Wizard of Oz | game | Jersey Jack Pinball's first game, 2011 release; theme that inspired Newhart's charitable hospital donation campaign | | NASCAR | game | Stern pinball game purchased by Newhart as his first new in-box game; damaged unit led to replacement cabinet gesture from Jack Guarneri | ### Topics - **Primary:** Pinball distribution business and retail operations, Pinball machine collecting and restoration across multiple eras, Community engagement and stewardship in pinball hobby, Jersey Jack Pinball's market impact and industry resurgence, Charitable initiatives placing pinball in children's hospitals, Boutique pinball manufacturers emergence (Spooky, American Pinball, etc.) - **Secondary:** Personal motivation and family connections to pinball hobby, Customer service philosophy and sales approach, Show marketing and exhibition logistics - **Mentioned:** Vintage arcade and vending machine collecting beyond pinball ### Sentiment **Positive** (0.85) — Newhart's tone is reflective, appreciative, and celebratory of the pinball community and industry growth. He expresses gratitude toward mentors (Jack Guarneri), collaborators, and friends. Minor negative elements include self-deprecating humor about his collecting obsession and acknowledgment of past marketing missteps (hotel door hangers), but these are presented with humor rather than defensiveness. Overall sentiment reflects pride in business success, community contribution, and personal passion. ### Signals - **[business_signal]** Show booth logistics becoming economically challenging due to game inventory costs and availability constraints (confidence: medium) — Newhart states: 'I don't do shows and boots of that size any longer because of the difficulty of getting the games and also the price of the games' - **[business_signal]** Jersey Jack Pinball's entry in 2011 triggered industry-wide competition and innovation from Stern and emergence of multiple boutique manufacturers (confidence: high) — Newhart explicitly attributes pinball resurgence to JJP: 'I attribute Jack Guarneri to starting the resurgence of pinball and the boutique companies that came after him...when someone new came in the market, they had to up their game' - **[community_signal]** Distributors creating branded merchandise (water bottles, door hangers) and podcast sponsorships to build brand awareness at shows (confidence: high) — Newhart describes distributing 50 cases of labeled water bottles and hotel door hangers, plus sponsoring 'Pinball Star of the Month' segment on Spooky podcast - **[event_signal]** Pinball Expo serving as major industry gathering point for distributors, manufacturers, players, and content creators (confidence: high) — Newhart brings 35 games to Replay Effects show, describes aggressive marketing at Expo 2012/2013, and attributes show relationships to long-term business success - **[community_signal]** Distributors and manufacturers actively investing in community education, mentorship, and new player onboarding (confidence: high) — Newhart describes spending hours educating new collectors without asking for sale, and Jack Guarneri's proactive customer service: 'it was my responsibility to make it right for you' - **[market_signal]** Pinball as therapeutic/accessibility tool for children with disabilities and serious health conditions, driving charitable community initiatives (confidence: high) — Taylor's cerebral palsy therapy led Newhart's entry into hobby; this inspired donation of 7+ Wizard of Oz machines to children's hospitals via structured charitable programs - **[licensing_signal]** Licensing high-value IP themes (Wizard of Oz) enabling manufacturers to create commercially viable and emotionally resonant games (confidence: medium) — Newhart describes Wizard of Oz as Jersey Jack's first game and his choice for hospital donations due to emotional connection to the theme - **[market_signal]** Game pricing at $6,000-$15,000+ range creating entry barrier and business model tension for boutique manufacturers (confidence: high) — Newhart mentions Spooky's $6,000-$6,500 pricing strategy and later references $10,000+ entry costs for new collectors - **[community_signal]** Charlie Emery founded Spooky Pinball as boutique manufacturer with deliberate affordable pricing philosophy, contrasting with premium-tier positioning (confidence: high) — Newhart recalls arguments with Emery over pricing: 'he always wanted to keep the price point at $6,000, $6,500' despite suggestions to increase prices and invest in employees - **[personnel_signal]** Early distributors like Newhart played critical role in launching boutique manufacturer sales channels before digital marketing matured (confidence: high) — Newhart describes being first distributor for Spooky Pinball and largest for 5+ years, building relationships through shows and personal effort before online sales channels - **[product_concern]** Game restoration and customization standards debated in community; tension between originality and bling-out practices (confidence: medium) — Newhart recalls: 'there was a big argument...the debate of whether it was proper to restore games whether it was proper to put that much money into them...bling them out' - **[sentiment_shift]** Growing recognition of older pinball eras (wedgeheads, wood rails, pre-war) as underappreciated despite simple rule sets and addictive gameplay (confidence: medium) — Newhart advocates for appreciation of vintage machines: 'There's a lot of new people coming into the hobby...I don't see a lot of people...getting exposed to the older games' --- ## Transcript I do have some pictures that we're probably going to flip through when I'm done. It'll touch on a lot of the stuff that I'll talk about. So I'm probably going to need Martin to come up here when this thing is finished and he can get started, what has to get started. So my seminar started on the plane here. and started with a blank piece of paper and then I had to think about what I wanted to talk about. Rob invited me to come speak at Expo and obviously I said, I do it, but what do you want me to talk about? He said, well, you've been doing this long enough, you'll come up with it. So I kind of thought what I would do is kind of do my history in coin op and pinball and what I've done with the industry, my personal collection, and I'm kind of one of those people that went to the extreme with taking a hobby, turning it into a business, and then also being an extreme collector. So I'm going to kind of start, I guess, at the beginning. The title of my seminar is Honey, I Bought a Church. And what that means is at the end of 2019, I ended up purchasing a church for two purposes, to house my business, Pinball Star Amusements, which is a distributorship, and also to house my collection, which outgrew a prior building that I used, a commercial building, outgrew my house, and I needed a place to put everything. So I'm going to walk you through how I got to where I started and how I ended up purchasing a church. We still good? Okay. So I'll start off by saying I'm the guy that you always tell your wife that when maybe your wife complains that you're buying an extra pinball machine, if she does that, that I'm the guy that you point to and say, well, at least I'm not him because I can't stop. I love this stuff. I love arcade. I love coin op. And not just pinball machines. I collect everything. I collect vending machines, old-style arcade games, which are pitch-and-back games, kiddie rides, all kinds of crazy stuff. And hopefully we'll be able to show you some pictures here at the end of some of the things that I do. My collecting stuff started, like probably a lot of you, with collecting stuff when you were a kid. And for me, it was baseball cards. and, you know, I would collect baseball cards and want to have every card in the set. And back in those days, it wasn't just as easy to go into the store and buy the baseball card that you were missing. You know, you might have collected 375 of the cards in the set, and there were three cards missing, and it might have taken you two years to stumble across that card in a box at a friend's garage or something like that. So I've always been one to collect and want to complete the set of stuff, and that kind of parlayed itself into the pinball world, which I guess is good and bad because these things are expensive and they're also very big. So you can't just stick them in a box like you can. We're all set? Okay. I get it. Okay. Thank you. Maybe I'll try to pull some pictures up here as I could. So this one's there. That's my son, Taylor. Taylor's now 29 years old. Taylor was born with a mild form of cerebral palsy, and he's what got me started in pinball, believe it or not. He was having some surgery done to his legs where they were lengthening his heel cords, and his therapist said to him, you know, you need to find something that he'll do to stand upright for a long period of time. We don't want him just sitting, and, you know, we have to stretch his legs and make sure those muscles stretch. And off the cuff, his therapist suggested maybe an arcade machine or a pinball machine. Now, I always played video games when I was a kid. I wasn't much into pinball. I was a child of the 80s, born in the 60s. I was a teenager in the 80s, so, you know, I was sticking quarters in Ms. Pac-Man and Galaga and Space Invaders and all that sort of stuff. But I was intrigued by pinball machines. And so this was maybe, you know, 2002. Went on the Internet, what there was of the Internet then, and I tried to find pinball machines where I lived. And I found a guy that had, you know, a little pinball business that he resold used games. And that Christmas I ended up buying three machines very cheaply for, you know, my son's purpose. And it very quickly became an obsession of mine. I found myself going to work late. I found myself tinkering with them and trying to learn how to fix them. I found myself cleaning them up on weekends, and soon enough, those three first pinball machines morphed into more. And it also then became something that, this is my other son, this is Patrick, it became something that my son Patrick and I did as a hobby. He would go to shows, we'd go all over the country, we'd go to shows in California, we'd do tournaments. That particular picture is from Expo. I don't know what year, maybe 2010 or 11 or something. And they had an Expo Brawl tournament that was a doubles tournament. And I'd bring my son, and we'd end up doing a tournament together, and we had a lot of fun with that. So I built a lot of bonding memories with my other son through pinball because we traveled together. We always took a couple extra days, you know, after a show, and we would visit the city. If we went to San Francisco, we would spend an extra day in San Francisco. So we got to see a lot of the country and bond through pinball. When he was about 13, he became a better pinball player than me, constantly beating me. And it was fun for me to see that he got into something a lot that I loved, but it's not fun not being able to beat him anymore. So that wasn't good. So then back in the day, we bought pinball machines on eBay for the most part. There was a website called RGP, which was kind of like the predecessor of Pinside. And pretty much if you got games, you were getting them from operators or you were getting them from containers overseas. and a lot of times they weren't in great condition so a lot of the games had to be restored and fixed up and one person that i hooked up with initially was chris hutchins who owns high-end pins and i started sending some of my games to chris to be restored and back then that was a big argument you know people debate things on pin side now the cost of games back then it was the debate of whether it was proper to restore games whether it was proper to put that much money into them whether it was proper to you know bling them out as much as chris did uh back to originality and make the games really nice so uh there's always been some drama in the hobby and it just changes from time to time um and i started trying to collect other stuff you know i started getting into jukeboxes and uh vending machines soda machines popcorn machines uh unique old arcade stuff like uh pitching bats that had a basketball theme and back in the 60s and 70s they made games that were really unique because they were different and they weren't just you know a standard puck bowling bowling game there was a bowling game but maybe there was some aspect of bowling or basketball involved with it. So, you know, I have some pictures. Hopefully we'll be able to get some time to show you some of those. So my hobby went from a couple pinball machines that were from the 90s, and then with pinball I started discovering era, you know, each era back in time. So I initially collected the 90s games, and then I went back not so much in the 80s, but I kind of skipped into the 70s games. I really fell in love with wedge heads from the 60s. and other games in the 70s. I love drop targets. A lot of that era has drop targets in their games, so they were appealing to me. Then I discovered wood rails. You know, maybe another year later I started buying, and I'd buy two or three wood rails and work through which ones I thought I liked and wanted to keep, and eventually I ended up back in the 1930s with pre-war pinball machines. And the common thread with all of them is that I love them all. They all appeal to me in some manner. the 90s games had multi balls and complex rules that you had to learn but sometimes i'd come home from work after a bad day and i just wanted to have a five minute game i didn't want to play for 20 minutes you know going through different modes and wizard modes and multi balls and stuff i i wanted to play a simple three minute game and a lot of those older games are just very addictive and simple rule set and i love them so i think that's one thing that's maybe missing a little bit today. There's a lot of new people coming into the hobby, even though I sell the new things. I don't see a lot of people, you know, getting exposed to the older games and getting an appreciation for them. So, you know, if you haven't played a Wedgehead or a Woodrail, you know, Woodrails are pretty slow playing, but they've got great Americana. They've got great artwork on them. You really should try to put some time on them and appreciate them for the gameplay. You know, they're addicting. They're those type of games that, well, I got this far, and I need one more drop target. I got to hit start again, and it's not going to, you know, you're not going to break a sweat playing them like you might some of the newer stuff. So my first new in-box game that I bought was probably five years later. My distributor was Jack from Pinball Sales, and he's now Jersey Jack, and Jack was a distributor like I am back in the day, and I learned a lot from Jack sometimes at that point I didn't really understand what I was learning or where I would use it but I remember I got a NASCAR game and when I got the game there was some damage on the front of the cabinet and somebody markered it and I know it wasn't Jack because he sold me the game new in the box so it was either Stern or it was the cabinet manufacturer that repaired the game and I complained about a little bit but I you know I said yeah I just want you to know I sent them a picture. It's a little disappointing to spend this much money. All the complaints that I get today from my customers when something isn't perfect with the game, and rightfully so. So about two weeks later, I get a call from a trucking company that they have a crate for me. I'm like, well, I'm not expecting anything. They said, well, we have it here. This is your address. I said, yeah. I said, okay, deliver it. They brought it, and it was a stern box. I opened the box up and it was an empty NASCAR cabinet from Stern that Jack on his own had bought for me to replace the cabinet that I was disappointed in He certainly didn need to do that certainly didn need to pay for it and I certainly had no interest in swapping out a cabinet at that time So I gave Jack a call, and he said, well, you weren't happy, and that's important to me that the customers are satisfied, whether or not Stern paid for it or whoever's fault it was, it was my responsibility to make it right for you. And that's kind of a lesson that I carry with myself now as a distributor, and I try to think back how I felt when I got something that I spent my heart and money on that wasn't up to par. So I always think back to that and try to think that, you know, should I step in? Even if the company isn't going to do something for the customer, is there something I can do to help them out to make them have a good experience? So, you know, Jack always had that, you know, that mindset with himself. So from there, I continued to buy new and boxed games every so often when one came out that I had an interest in. And lo and behold, in 2011, Jack decided that he was going to start a pinball company, Jersey Jack Pinball. And being a close friend of his, after a couple months after the announcement, I was talking to him, and I said, is there anything I can do to help? Anything I can be involved with in some way? I had no idea what. In my other career, I am in sales, and he said, you know what? He goes, I know you own a business. I know you know how to handle money. I know you know how to handle customers and make sure they're taken care of, and that's what I want. He goes, I want people in the hobby to sell my games. I don't want the 800-pound commercial gorilla. I want people in the hobby that are known and that can take care of people. So that's kind of where I became a distributor. I was thinking this was just going to be a small little side business for myself that I would have fun with, and it's grown into a business where I sell, you know, over the years I've sold thousands of games, millions of dollars worth of pinball machines for something that I just thought would be a little hobby business. And it's been great watching the hobby expand, you know, since that time when Jack started. And it was also a way for me to fund my own addiction. You know, in my own mind, I'm thinking, well, if I buy a new in-box game maybe once every two years, maybe this is a way I could buy one every year, or I could buy, you know, more of the ones that I like, and it was kind of a way that I could justify spending more money on new in-box games. Also with that, and the reason I brought my boys up at the beginning of the seminar, is Jack's first game was Wizard of Oz. And when my son was young, he had to have a number of surgeries like the one that I mentioned, and we'd always be at a children's hospital in Philadelphia. And I'd be down there, and I always got to take my son home, which was a great thing. You know, he had a disability, and it's going to affect him for his whole life, but I always got to take him home. And when I was in those hospitals, I'd see kids that were cancer patients, were burn victims, and they weren't going home. So that made me think, before I even had the distributorship, that I felt guilty. I was like, wouldn't it be great for these kids to have a playroom where they would have pinball machines in there to play? Because I knew that they had activity rooms. They would have arts and crafts, video games, puzzles, and things like that, that the kids that were stuck in the hospital can go there. And they had, you know, child life services people that would work with them during the course of the day and give them fun activities to do. And I always felt guilty that I was taking my son home, and I had all these pinball machines at home, many of which I didn't turn on, you know, for a week or two at a time, and it would be great to always have them, you know, to have them in the hospital for the kids. So that was in my head for years. And then when Jersey Jack started his company and Wizard of Oz was the theme, it literally was like an anvil dropping on my head that I have to do this. I didn't have a choice. This was an idea that I had years ago and now had an opportunity with a great theme to do it with, and I had the wherewithal with my company to somehow fund it and create it. So what I did is we would run tournaments. We would run, I was the precursor to the raffles. I started doing some raffles. We did tournaments here at Pinball Expo. We did tournaments at Papa in Pittsburgh, and we raised money, and I also set aside a portion of the profits of every game that I sold into a side account that I used to purchase Wizard of Oz machines. And over that time, we purchased five Wizard of Oz machines that I donated to St. Christopher's Hospital in Philadelphia, which was where my son got treatment. A customer of mine had an affiliation with Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, which is a different hospital. It's called CHOP, and he wanted to donate one there, so I partnered with him. I did one out in Pittsburgh because the people at Papa were so wonderful to always allow me to come there and bring the Wizard of Oz games and run little side tournaments, and that wasn't really a show like that. It was more of a tournament space. They allowed me to do that, so I thought it would be great to give back to their community. And then the last two machines I donated to Project Pinball, who had already started doing the same sort of thing that I was doing, and I donated my last two machines to Project Pinball. We placed one in New York City, and another one went to North Carolina. And from there, I saw that Project Pinball had the network that they were starting to build because these games have to be maintained. You need a repair person in those cities to repair the games and take care of them when something breaks because that's the worst thing. You don't want a child going into the room excited to play the pinball machine, and it's not working. So, you know, Dan Spoiler was working on putting all that stuff together, and I ended up deciding that I was kind of going to step aside and I did what was important to me, which was put one in the hospital where my son was and then we did four more beyond that. And then kind of Dan took the mantle from there with Project Pinball, which makes me very proud that, you know, he continues to this day. We were talking today that he continues to do that. So then Pinball Star started and I had the charity thing already taken care of and I was a new distributor. There weren't a lot of distributors. There weren't a lot of distributors like there are today out on the floor, and I decided to do a really aggressive marketing blitz. I wanted the Pinball Star name out there. I wanted my logo out there, and the first show that we did, we came to Pinball Expo probably 2012 or 2013, and we did it all. I've got some pictures if we get time to show them. We did water bottles. I purchased probably 50 cases of water at Sam's, and we put our own labels on the water bottles, and we handed them out at the outside of every seminar and outside of the rooms where the games were. We did door hangers, which I actually got in trouble for. I'm glad Rob left the room. But we got in trouble for that. My son and I walked around the entire hotel, every single floor, and we put a door hanger with Pinball Star, the Wizard of Oz, and a little discount we were offering. on every single door in the hotel. And when the show was over, I got a call from Rob's partner at the time, Mike Pesak, and Mike wasn't too happy with me. Mike's here at the show today, which is nice to see him back at Expo. But Mike wasn't happy. He said, you can't do that because you can't put stuff on the doors. And then I got in trouble because some of the ice spilled on the floor from the water bottles. But, you know, that's what I wanted to do. I wanted to get our name out there, and I wanted to meet people, and I wanted to start selling machines and sell as many Wizard of Oz machines at that time. And the nice thing is I made my first sale as I was walking on the plane at O'Hara. My phone rang. I picked my phone up, and some guy I didn't know from Chicago said, Oh, I saw your flyer. I saw your door hanger and whatnot. And he goes, I want to purchase a Wizard of Oz. So it was kind of cool that I went to my first show. Didn't sell anything the whole show. Met a lot of people. and then before I got on the flight to go home, I had my first pinball machine installed. So that's where it started. From there, and I attribute Jack Guarnieri to starting the resurgence of pinball and the boutique companies that came after him. I think it's all because Jack took a chance and started making a game fully featured with an LCD screen, with magnets, with all kinds of mechanical toys on them, because prior to that, there was no competition to Stern, and they frankly just weren't doing that. They're a great company. They kept pinball alive. But when someone new came in the market, they had to up their game, and it also brought a lot of other players into the market. All the companies you see today, American Pinball, Spooky Pinball, Dutch Pinball, Pinball Brothers, all the new people that are on the floor today that are making new games that are just coming out, that's all great stuff. And it's all because Jack took a chance and started a pinball company and wanted to do something that nobody else was willing to do. So the growth of the hobby, I attribute specifically to him. We continued to build the business through Facebook, email marketing. We did a lot of shows. I do reveal parties. Whenever a new game came out, like if The Hobbit came out, I had a bunch of locations in Pennsylvania where I'm from, and we would bring the game and do parties. And Jack would always gracious, Jack would always come to the parties and be there and meet with people and sign anything you needed signed. I'd print up posters. Jack would sign 500 posters for me, and we'd give them out to the people. So it was all about getting the word out and also trying to grow the hobby and get new people involved, and we were hopefully successful with doing that. Obviously, my business did well. We did a lot of shows, and a lot of times we would bring – I think my biggest show maybe was Replay Effects, and we brought 35 games there. And let me tell you, it's not an easy thing. Show some appreciation and thank the distributors that are here at Expo. It's a lot of money. It's a lot of hard work. It's a lot of physical work. It's a lot of sleepless nights and then tearing down and bringing everything home and unpacking everything. And frankly, a lot of times you don't make the sales at the show. It's really the residual stuff that you get after the show, the relationships that you made, the people you met, and hopefully they remember you and give you a call after the show, or even nine months later if a different game comes out that they want to buy, they remember that you made the effort at the show. So, you know, we got to the point where we're bringing so many games to the show, big Penske trucks filled with games, and I think today I don't do, it's hard to get inventory number one but we don't do shows and boots of that size any longer because of the difficulty of getting the games and also the price of the games you know every game that on a shelf on the booth floor you know we purchasing and putting in the booth but it was a lot of fun to bring all those games and have people come up to us afterwards And even if they weren buying something just say hey thank you for bringing you know all the games to the show. You made the show for me. I really wanted to play The Hobbit or Dialed In or whatever the new game was at that point. From there, we started picking up other companies. after 2013, 2014, more pinball companies started coming onto the market, and we picked them up as carriers. I was the first distributor for Spooky Pinball. Whenever we market Spooky Pinball, I'm always proud to say that I was their first and still their largest distributor. And that was because I kind of had faith in Charlie Emery, of what he was doing, and his mindset. It wasn't necessarily that he had technical skills that I knew about or that I thought he knew more about pinball, but I knew he was a good, honest person, and I knew he was always trying to do his best with the games. He was always very conscious of the price. Trust me, him and I had had arguments over time where I would always tell him, I think you should charge a little bit more and then put that money back into the company to hire employees, and he always wanted to keep the price point at $6,000, $6,500, whatever America's Most Haunted and Rob Zombie was. From there, I suggested to Charlie that actually my first interaction with Charlie was asking to be a sponsor on his podcast. So we had a segment on his podcast that ran every month called the Pinball Star of the Month, and I would get somebody that I knew in the hobby, maybe somebody that wasn't strictly like a pinball designer or people that had been on other podcasts, like Joshua Clay had the, you know, the old This or Pinball podcast, and he had all the, you know, the people from Chicago, all the designers on his show. I wanted different people. I wanted an operator. I wanted a location owner like Brad Baker here at Pinball Garage in Ohio. I wanted somebody that I knew that collected wood rails and tried to get some different, you know, information out there to the people that were listening to the podcast. So for a few years, we did a segment on the Spooky Pinball Podcast called the Pinball Star of the Month. And then from that is where my relationship with Charlie started. He was struggling to sell games, and he wasn't traveling to shows outside of the Midwest. And I said, hey, I bought a game. I was actually his first customer. I said, let me take my game to the shows that I do with Pinball Star. no financial relationships let me just get the exposure out there and then from there we were a little successful and I ended up becoming a distributor for Charlie he said I think it would be great to have you on the team and I became a Spooky distributor and I was probably the only Spooky distributor for maybe five years three or four different games and then a few other fellows came on but they still have a very limited number of distributors but I was always proud to be their first one and their largest In the meantime, my collection kept growing. Obviously, I had some profits from Pinball Star that I now can justify being a crazy collector. And that collection that started with three games became 20, became 40, became 80, became 120. And soon enough, I had games of every era. I had unique arcade games of all different styles. and I loved just going to shows and discovering something different. If there was something coin-op that I hadn't seen before that was, you know, maybe a different genre, I'm trying to think like vending machines I wasn't into initially, and then all of a sudden I appreciated vending machines. I bought a cigarette machine. I bought a soda machine. I bought a candy machine. And I'd go there to pull a soda out. I wouldn't go to the refrigerator. I would go and stick the diamond and pull the Coke out of the machine. And for me it was fun. I always thought, well, where was this machine? And some of you may do that with your pinball machines. Where did this thing live before I had it? Was it in a smoky bar? Was it in a bowling alley? And I always loved having, you know, on pinball machines, maybe burn marks on the wood rails in somebody's cigarette. To me, that's like history. That tells a little story that that game has a little history to it. You know, and we picked up more companies. we ended up continuing to do shows and one thing I've always tried to do is always try to be a good steward to the hobby new people coming into the hobby if you're at a show and there's somebody next to you and they seem like they're new explain the game to them tell them what to do I always try to spend time with a newbie that calls me to purchase their pinball machine they always say I don't know anything about them I don't know how hard it is to fix them I've never owned one before, and I know I'm going to be on the phone for an hour. And fortunately, I have a very patient wife, Michelle, who's sitting over there. She sits in the car if we're driving somewhere, and she hears the same conversations a thousand times, and she lets me do my thing. But I love talking to new people in the hobby, and I'll spend time with them. And a lot of times, I'll never ask for a sale. I'm just trying to educate them about what's out there, the different companies, the different themes. I try to ask them questions about what they're interested in. Do they like sci-fi? Do they like rock bands? Do they like movies? And from there, we can kind of, you know, wiggle our way to find out what might be the best machine for them. Because ultimately, from a selfish standpoint, if somebody doesn't like pinball that bought their first machine and spent $10,000 on them, they're not going to buy number two. So I always want to make sure that they love what they buy and that it's something that, you know, like the Lay's potato chip, that you can't just have one, that they're going to want more and more after that. So it's always nice when I get off the phone with somebody and they say, you know, you weren't the first distributor I called, and I called so-and-so, and after three minutes they asked me if I was ready to buy or if I knew which one I wanted to buy. And they said, I've been on the phone with you for an hour, and you haven't even asked me once whether I wanted to buy something. And that's kind of cool. I like when I hear that because it means that, you know, I'm doing what I want to do, which is kind of, again, try to be a good steward to the hobby. You know, throughout all those years, I made so many great friends, other distributors, location owners, companies that I worked for. I'm going to mention Brad again because he's sitting there. He told me he was going to heckle me, but he hasn't done that yet, so I'm going to be nice to him. Brad owned VP Cavs which is a virtual pinball company and we ended up representing Brad for a number of years until he recently got into the business of owning the pinball garage and Brad and I we text daily, maybe not multiple times a day, Michelle's shaking her head too because there's nights that she's like and she calls these guys that I text all the time that we just joke back and forth or talk pinball She calls them my pinball girlfriends. Brad, you are my pinball girlfriend. Well, you're kind of cute. All right, so then it kind of brings me, I'm trying to go chronologically, it kind of brings me to like 2017 to 2019. And at that point, two things were happening. I married my wife, Michelle, and we had a plan to build a new house. So I had to decide what I was going to do with my collection, which was now, unfortunately, I always had a rule that if something came in, and a lot of you may have this rule, if new one comes in, one's got to go because you only got so much room, and I would never wrap a game up in a blanket and shrink wrap and store it, but I started doing that, and I ended up filling rooms of an office building that I own with games that were wrapped up that maybe I had fishtails in my house for 10 years, and I'm like, you know what? I got to pull that out because I got something new coming in, but I still like fishtails. I don't want to sell it. So I'd wrap it up. I'd put it in the basement of my office building, and by the time a few years passed and I get to the late, you know, 2010s, 2017 to 19, I probably had 50 to 75 games wrapped up in my basement that didn't have a home, and I felt bad. Every once in a while, I would rotate games in and out, but I needed a plan. So we were going to build a new house, and I thought, that's great. I'm going to build an outbuilding, or I'm going to dig the basement out underneath the garage. And I had my contractor give me a quote to dig out underneath the garage, and there was like rebar and, you know, pillars that had to be put in. He gave me the price, and I'm like, that's ridiculous. Like, I can't justify doing that. And then I got prices to put an outbuilding like a pole barn on my property, and that was outrageous too. So finally I thought, I'm going to buy a commercial building, and I needed a new home for Pinball Star. I was operating an office building. It wasn't really conducive for trucks to come and do deliveries. I didn't have a place to have a real showroom, and I decided that I wanted to look for a building. And that's where the church comes in. So we ended up going around with my real estate agent one day and looking at buildings, and she was showing me industrial park-type buildings, crummy dirty concrete buildings next to the railroad tracks and i don't want any of that i wasn't worried about someone stealing pinball machines but i certainly want somebody breaking in and going with a hammer and breaking all the glass i'd have a real mess on my hands so at the end of the day we spent the whole day looking at buildings i said nothing's going to fit my need here i kind of told her what i wanted it for and she said well put my thinking cap on and i'll get back to you about three days later she called me back she said you know i have this church, would you want to look at it? It's been on the market for 20 years, off and on. I said, sure, I'll take a look at it. I went and looked at it, and it was beautiful. It was a 60s, older 60s style church, and it had exactly what I needed. It had a huge room, which was the chapel. It had other little small rooms that were very large that I was going to be thinking in my mind as I'm walking through. There's three rows of pinball machines. There's four rows of pinball machines, every room I went in. And I didn't have to do a lot to the building. It was in a nice residential area, and it was accessible to tractor trailers. So I could have my showroom, and I could have my whole collection that I'd been wrapping up and putting, you know, in the basement of my office building at this building. I remember when I left, I called my wife, and I said, I think I want to buy a church, honey. That's the title of the seminar. So long story short, we ended up buying the church it was a really reasonable price building and uh in 2020 right before covid we closed and i started going through the building we had to take all the pews out of it uh we had to clean up all the other rooms i didn't really have to do much uh carpeting and flooring was good we we painted the walls and made things nice um and then we started moving the games in And that took and we did it through COVID as on weekends uh but that probably took a good six months for us to move every game that i had uh at various locations wrapped up into the building and then organizing them in the building setting them up testing them some of them hadn't been opened up in a number of years so um it was a project that took six months every single weekend i had customers come help me i had my delivery staff come and help me I had a couple of local guys that every weekend that had a trailer, they would come. It was a lot of hard work, and it was kind of my project during COVID. So it was nice that I was able to use that time to kind of get everything set up in the church. And the cool thing, I'm a collector. I already said that, right? So what I was able to do is when I laid the rooms out, I thought, well, Well, it drives me crazy when somebody posts their pictures of their game room, and they have all the Jersey Jack games, and they've got the Hobbit dialed in, then Wizard of Oz, then Willy Wonka, then Pirates. And I look at it, and I'm like, they're not in order. They're supposed to be in chronological order. So that's kind of what I did in the church. Every room, the games are in chronological order. If it's the room, the Sunday School room has all the 90s D&D games, they're in chronological order in the date that they came out down the rows and back up the rows the chapel uh the biggest part of my collection are all the stern games i have every stern game of the modern era from i think strike uh striker extreme was the first one uh all the way through and they're all in alphabetical order up and down the rows and but the neat thing that i was going to touch on is i was able to i had the right number of games that i have one room that it's all wedge heads and wood rails i have one room that's all the 70s uh bally games like harlem globe trotters and and dolly parton and the rolling stones and captain fantastic uh i've got another room that's all the dmds the bally williams stuff from the 1990s and then the chapel uh two-thirds of it is all the stern games and then the other third of it is all the new stuff uh the jjp the Spooky, the American Pinball, all the companies that I sell for, those are on the other side, so I have a little showroom for all the new games that we sell, and I have my personal collection. And then at my house, what I do is I keep a couple most recent games from each company. I'll keep maybe two Jersey Jacks, two Sterns, maybe another game or two, and then I handpicked one of each era, one Wedgehead, one Woodrail. So I have a nice little variety at my house, but the majority of all the pinball machines are at the church. And all the arcade stuff, that's all at my house. All the pitching back games, all that sort of thing. The church is just strictly pinball machines. And I have a tech. I use Ray Brackens at White Area Repair in Philadelphia. He comes up once every two months, spends a day, and anything that needs to be fixed, we keep lists for him. He comes through, fixes everything. you know my collection now is probably 250 to 300 pieces and i say pieces because some things are are small uh you know countertop games from the 50s or unique stuff i have about 200 pinball machines at the church uh they're all operational everyone works everything's in great shape there's no games that are broken down if they are broken down and we get our tech to fix them. Now, one thing with the church, being that it was in the 60s, in the 60s everybody walked to a local supermarket, everybody walked to the school, the church, and things like that. So there's not a lot of parking there. And also I had to be very careful with zoning, coming out of a church-zoned building into kind of a commercial space. I had to be very careful. So my zoning is for storage of my personal collection. I was honest and told them I operated a business and that it would be low maintenance. I'm not looking to open an arcade. I don't want people dropping quarters. But I do have a plan to hopefully start having events at the building, have some tournaments that we can get a bus and maybe have people park at a nearby shopping center, and then we'll bring people to the church. It could probably fit 100 people at a time comfortably with all the games and the space that we have there and just shuttle people back and forth and be able to share the collection. I went to visit Rob's Pastimes Arcade in August, and it was just great. By far, it's the best collection that I've ever seen. Rob Burke that runs the Pinball Expo. Everything is operational. He bought a supermarket. it kind of the same idea that I had to start sharing your collection with the community and just on a bigger scale. He's got one big room. Everything is in fantastic shape. He's got some really rare, unique games there. So I was thrilled. I spent all day there with Rob. What else do I want to talk about? I've got some rare stuff. I've got some prototype games, different things. I'm not really into having the highest value game or having the rarest game. To me, it's all about gameplay. I've had some antique arcade games that were really sought after and rare, and I play them and they're boring. But everybody clamors for them. At auctions, they go for high prices. I'll sell it because if it's not fun to play, I don't want to look at it. I want to play it. I want to experience it. I want people to be able to play it and enjoy it. So I do have some rare stuff. I have a prototype. Probably the neatest thing I've got is I have the prototype game that Pat Lawler made when he was designing Banzai Run. And back in the day, they wouldn't share their information with other designers of what they were making. They would go home and make a prototype of something if they had an idea in their head, and they wouldn't share it with anybody. They did this with Pinball 2000, with the Revenge for Mars game with the hologram in it, and Pat did it with the Banzai Run game with the vertical play field. He made a game at home. It's called Wrecking Ball. It's made of plywood. It's the ugliest thing you ever want to see, but it's a working game, and it's Pat Waller's idea of wanting to make a vertical play field on the back of the game. and in the church I have his prototype game. And then what they would do, they would bring it into Williams and he would say, here's what I came up with, what do you think? And that particular game, they actually rejected it. The story is that they didn't want to do it and Pat put his tail between the legs, put it back in the van, brought it back to his house and stuck it in his pole barn or shed in his backyard, he told me. And that's where it sat. And then about a year or two later, they decided, hey, bring that thing back, that monstrosity that you made. We want to take a look at it. And from there, they made Banzai Run. So in the church, I have the two of them side by side. I have the prototype and the actual Banzai Run game that they ended up making. And they are different. There's a couple of nuances that are the same, but some of them are different. What else interesting can I talk about? Celebrities. Celebrities love pinball. and I've had the good fortune to work with some of them and deliver games to some of them. We delivered Rob Zombie's Rob Zombie game to his house. He's got a house in Connecticut. Charlie Emery from Spooky gave me a call and said, hey, I was going to do this myself, but I really don't have the time to do it. I'd like to see if, you know, you want to deliver his game. We're going to ship it to him. You go there, you set it up, and set it up in his barn, which was his man cave he did his paintings in there he's an artist and uh he had all kinds of if you if you know rob zombie he had a lot of like crazy stuff and it was really cool to see so i delivered his game to him uh we delivered um neil patrick harris as a magician the actor doogie hauser um he loves he's a magician and his uh what do they call him his manager actually bought a Houdini game for him for his birthday. They went through American Pinball, and American Pinball called me and said, hey, Joe, you're a great distributor for us. Would you like to deliver Neil Patrick Harris' game to his house in New York City? So we did that. My wife and I went. We had a lot of fun that day visiting his house and touching things we shouldn't have been touching and looking at his Emmys and stuff. But by far the most interesting thing, and I know we're going to wrap up here, that we did is we delivered a dialed-in game to Guns N' Roses backstage at one of their shows in Hershey, Pennsylvania. It was something that Jack set up for me in 2017 or 16, 17. Guns N' Roses was still on the drawing board in terms of being a theme that Jersey Jack was going to do, and he asked me, would you like to bring a game for Slash to play? He wants to show the whole band what we do and what our games are like. And I said, absolutely. So we spent a whole day with Slash. When I tell you he was the most down-to-earth guy that you would ever want to meet, all he cared about that day was pinball. There were other people there that wanted his attention, and he just stood there and played pinball with us all afternoon. And then when the concert was over, he came back, and there were a lot more people there, and he still just wanted to play pinball, which was kind of cool. He actually told me when we were leaving, he put his arm around me, and just like you would expect Slash to sound, he said, dude, he goes, I got to tell you. He goes, I almost screwed up my guitar solo because all I could think about was going backstage after the concert and playing pinball. That was like the best comment he could have ever said to me, and it was a great ending to a fantastic day. So that's pretty much it. You know, I've got other stories I can tell, I could talk forever. Pinball is a great thing. I'm glad you're all here. I'm glad everybody enjoys it. Some of my best friendships are through the pinball hobby and the business. I've made some great friends with, you know, customers and people that I work with in business. So continue to do what you're doing. Continue to share the hobby with other people. Continue to show children pinball machines that don't understand what they are. help them honor the show and keep coming to the shows and supporting the shows support your distributors support the mod makers and everybody that does things in the hobby the tournament directors everybody is doing really good stuff in the hobby and just try to support them so thank you very much I hope you had a good time and sorry we didn't get to the pictures but there's always next year Thank you. _(Acquisition: youtube_groq_whisper, Enrichment: v3)_ --- *Exported from Journalist Tool on 2026-04-13 | Item ID: bdf62024-5fec-475f-a911-95f54979d598*