But as some people say I can't find anything They all call you up screaming, you know, they haven't been able to find the game and I said I didn't do every game I wish I had but Well thing is remember I was doing stuff before anybody else. So I that is a good claim to fame How did you end up in the hobby? When was the first time you fell in love with arcade and pinball machines? Originally, I actually don't even count the years, I got involved with games in 1973. That's when my uncle asked me to get games for his campground because we started looking around and trying to track down games. I had already been fooling around with games. A friend of mine, my best friend and I bought a little vendor. He wanted to get out of the vending business and sell pinball machine cleaning products. He opened a company called New Look and New Look was selling pinball machine wax, playfield wax, glass cleaner. He actually formulated a whole bunch of different chemical stuff. My friend, my best friend, bartered pictures and the other half of the games that we could sell if we quote unquote fix them up in the local papers that we didn't do much to him we got him going we changed a few lines and a few other things that we had to do. We had to put in a lot of the light bulbs that were burned out. We didn't change them all, just the ones burned out. Because we had also inherited a bunch of parts from him. We basically cleaned out his shop of everything he had. And oddly enough, I didn't have enough room to put it. I ended up putting a bunch of games in Kurt, who's my longest employee here, his father's basement. He let me use it. And I remember seeing Kurt's little face peering through the handlebars of the steps, looking at me as we brought these Curt was only maybe eight years old or nine and I was like ten years older. I was 18, 19 years old and there's Curt, a future lifetime employee here watching his first experience with pinball. The machines basically a lot of the stuff we put in this basin were parts and we, Scott and I did very well selling these machines. I kind of got hooked in the mechanical part but it was still a hobby and we made a few bucks The went the different direction he went into computer programming But he kept a couple games in his house for the longest time Oddly enough the last game was stunt pilot stunt pilot was a midway mechanical game It was just wonderful and Scott had gotten it working And he kept it all those years and moved it to his new house about 30 minutes west of TNT and Scott passed away of colon cancer and I ended up selling that game just, I want to say about ten or maybe five years ago. I did a video on Stunt Pilot. It's the last machine from our original purchase back in the 70s. Scott kept it all those years in his house. It's a wonderful mechanical game. So it was kind of interesting that it kept that life. That was the only thing remaining from the first package deal of games. I was buying games for my uncle and then I started buying my own in 1979 I made a few purchaseses bought my first arcade games to put in a store locally my uncle's campground was in Tennessee so he wasn't local he was open in the summer so I would drive down spend the summer there I spent I think 15 16 summers in Tennessee but had a good time learned a lot learn how to do a lot of wiring and fixing The if you're in a campground you're doing fixing your fixing old cabins that we fixing the plumbing and that sort of stuff i picked up a lot of mechanical knowledge which i still use today of course i've picked up a lot of repair knowledge on mechanical games because half the stuff my uncle had was were mechanical pinballs which ran very well if you kept playing them if they sat dormant you know in a garage All the mechanisms froze. It was different. Coincidentally, I had a similar experience growing up. My parents went to a fishing resort every weekend and they had an entire row of EM and solid state pinball machines. And I think that it was like an unwritten rule that every campground had to own a Nugent and a Gottlieb Surfchamp. And that's actually the game, that's my favorite EM game. and I had to maintain those because otherwise, if I, because I was like the only kid that I ever went in that back of that little office area and actually played all of them. And so I ended up cleaning contacts and, you know, just it kept alive. And then nine months would go by, you know, fall, winter, spring, we'd go back up there and I'd have to go through tear down the machine again just so I could play it for the summer. What about your educational background? I mean, aside from just getting into the What did you do when you started in the arcade? Well, I took shop. I took electrical shop in high school. But when I went to Temple University, my major was filmmaking. So there was nothing to do with it except I got a job running the two game rooms at Temple and the movie theater. I learned a lot of the business at the game room at Temple University. Actually, this is some information now I'll give you I've never shared before. So here's a plus. At Temple, the vending company was a company called ARA Services, very large company that had mostly food, but they went into the home recreation and not home, but games in locations and such. And they had the contract at Temple to put the arcade and we did a split and back then splits were outrageous for the location they got a lot of money the split at temple was 64% to temple and 36% to the vendor who was ARA really shitty split great for temple but not great for area and they were kind of out of their league because they could put a pinball machine and I remember when they put a and the money back then was counted differently. The cash pan had to have a lid and it had to have a seal. And we, one of the temple person, one of us, one of our, I assigned other people to collect the money, but we had to be there when he emptied it and he dumped each cash pan in a bag and then sealed it with a little, one of these one-use only seals so when he laughed he had thirty six little bag full of coins and what a pain in the ass at book forever because you have to tell me that the meter re mr real pay today but that's how they did it physically candidate and then they checked the meters to see if the money was close there's always going to be a tiny bit of driftand we give you that could a free credit or test or something like that That's how it was done. And ARA did this for maybe two years and they were done. I remember them bringing new games in when Tempest was new. They would wrap it in all the games they were bringing in in plastic after they checked it out and put their stuff on them and got their serial numbers and plates stuck on them. And then they'd bring them to Temple wrapped in plastic and bring them in the game room. And it was just wonderful. I was not buying a few games, but I didn't have that kind of funds, and I didn't have that kind of location. Locations were tough. All the good spots, the 7-Elevens, were tied up. by the big vendors who had big money. Hey listen, I'm gonna put some games in here, we're gonna do a 50-50 split. And you know what I have in my hand here? I've got a $1500 cash gift just for you. All you have to do is sign us in for a year and a half or something like that. And we do 50-50. So the guy had a contract, he paid for the contract, but he paid a lot of money back because of course back then these games were doing Crane 1,200 a week gross, 300 and some 711s a week each machine. And that's something that I think a lot of people would find shocking because depending on the location and it's not me being critical of you know the operators in the least cause they're just doing the best they can. But I've gone to, I mean I can go within 15 minutes to my house and any place that has you know pinball machines for instance in their location Other than pretty much your pinball enthusiasts, I only see people occasionally hitting those. That's right. And that breaks my heart personally. But I kind of remember that from the early days of the arcade. Kevin Coughlin referenced that a lot of people line up for the arcade games and the role of pinball machines is usually vacant and take advantage of that. And I know there are guys in this hobby that shudder at that thought, but it's a realistic view. Yeah, it's those days, I guess you could say were glorious. I was horribly bitten by the vending bug, not the collecting bug. There's two different bugs. Okay, neat, two different bugs. I was fascinated with coin op. And I loved it. And my game rooms did very well. My gross on my main game room was about 3500 a week. We had a remote game room and it was only open five days a week. We I opened it at 8.30 in the morning, we closed it at 8.30 at night, 9 o'clock at night. So it's 12 hours a day, five days a week. We were not open Saturday and Sunday because the building wasn't. Occasionally we'd have a special event, but that didn't happen often. We also had an issue with the local kids coming in. Nice kids, nothing wrong, but they did not want the kids in the building. And they just wanted to play and have fun. I just hated that we had to keep them out. They said no, they can't be in the building. I said well they're not only coming into the building but they're coming into the game room. I said so you've got to police the front doors. But it was always a minor problem. We never really had an issue. I remember when the guy cleaning the floors in the game room moved the Star Wars, the Atari one, and grabbed it by the handles and when he pulled the game with Christophuppoppla, Trevestit ord Har discharge transaction Assignment Klobuchar comparisons 사용American used to think copier swiss or I used to get these guys out whenever there was a sale. For instance, the very first game to get closed out was Red Alert and Lock and Chase. They closed it out for $12.99. So, half price basically and then the Taito Lock and Chase and I told him about it. He was thrilled. He went over and bought one of each for Temple. Of course, 36%. It took him a while to get his money back. In the summer, ARA would I'm not a fan of the game not all of them but a lot and take them to another location where there's summer traffic was there finally here's the here's the best part of the story though the area approached me and I said look since we've had it we're going out of the business how about buying all the games we have and we're done so I said oh okay we've got a bunch of stuff we said we I decided we're just doing food, we're out of the arcade business. So I went over to their warehouse and that was probably my first purchase, my first major purchase. I bought all of the games they had in the warehouse that once they pulled everything back in, including that Tempest I saw them buy new. There must have been 60 machines. I did not have a big truck, but I was offered And I bought an old truck that had a double clutch and I bought it, it was cheap, it was like $1000 bucks for this truck. But it was, I got into the ground floor of the big truck and learned how to drive a double clutch. Which is really the same as a single clutch but you have to press the pedal twice. You press a pedal in, take it out of gear. It's in neutral. You lift your foot up, then you press it in a second time and move it into the gear you want to go in, and then release it. So it's a push-push type of thing. You have to do it quick, if you want to shift quickly, that is. But it was interesting. A lot of people aren't aware of double clutches. You don't run into them. But if you ever jump into an old truck, it's a double clutch, baby. I was in and I had my garage that I was storing stuff in and my brother let me store stuff in his garage and I gave him a little rental money and then I ended up in a friend's house in their garage and put stuff in their house just to store all the stuff. But then it got to be a point where I had to start renting so I started renting public storage spaces and I kept adding more and more and more in the early 80s. The option but at one point I was paying a lot of money in public storage you didn't have 24-hour access back then and They wouldn't give you a single penny off if you Rented a second or third or fourth or fifth play. I couldn't understand I said I said if somebody rents more than one Oh, no, there's zero discount and if they're Unrelenting company that would not accept it So when I finally moved everything into one location, I rented a large place, moved out. Oh, you should have told us that, you know, we would have been accommodating it. And I actually had rented an office and had a showroom at this public storage unit too. So I took all my business, which at the time was probably about $1,900 a month, and moved into a single-rent facility for half the price. Jac sandy HERRVER B 없고ультатst头 Nutrienticht Crisp fyory colleges importingrecpremGo总 communicative Can you just stop talking for like two seconds? Please support the following businesses. Pinball Pimp. Pinball Pimp, your source for museum quality restoration, maintenance as well as Jeff Miller's world famous cabinet stencil kits for Williams Valley as well as other manufacturers all available at pinballpimpstencils.com. Classic Arcade. Classic Arcades, your source for pop-up recap recreations, playfield overlays, insert decals, apron decals, cabinet artwork decals and much more at Classic-Arcades.com. Ladies and gentlemen, now back to the show. Oddly enough, when I did this building here, we had not thought of parties. So the party idea was a result of a customer that came in to buy a game and said, boy, I would sure like to bring my kid over here for his birthday. And I said, oh, I really? And he said, yeah, yeah, what would you charge? So I came up with like $50 for a couple hours of play for the family. I guess it was a family of four or five people. And they loved it. And I'm thinking, wow, The end result of those hundreds of parties we started with You know, we were up to almost 900 parties a week at our high point. Excuse me. And it was really busy. We were booked seven days a week, as many hours as we can. We had waiting lists of people that were hoping somebody would cancel and move in. You know, they could take the slot over, the last minute party. and the other places other than Chuck E. Cheese. That was it. You couldn't have, you know, now you can have a salon party, you can have a party at Home Depot, for goodness sakes. You can have a party anywhere. But back then it wasn't. And I knew I hit it big when in 89 I was filming a friend's birthday party at a steakhouse, You know, good 45 minutes away and as I walked around filming the people, I overheard one woman telling the other, we found this fantastic place where all the games are on and it's dark and mysterious and fun and we were playing all these games and everything was free and then there was another room for food and I said, do you mean TNT? And she said, yes, that's it. I said, that's me. So I knew I was big at that point. I knew that the parties would stick and se my The So when you did when you started TNT and I've watched your YouTube channel and I love watching the infomercials, I mean I remember I'm you know, I'm four years old and I Chronic insomniac my whole life and so late at night. I'd always end up watching infomercials for local businesses believe it or not and Sometimes they were great, you know, depending on what they were selling There was one that did nothing but classic cars, like classic car parts and that, so it was a huge infomercial. It was great. I want to say it was DRI Motors. So I've watched yours and I'm laughing because, you know, as a young spry individual with a formal suit. Well they said I should look nice for my appearance you know It was back then in the I going to say the good old days when there was no choices for TV shows And I won say shows were going off the air but a lot of them had virtually no broadcasting after 12 o The local cable channels were wide open for programming but the cable channels were unmanned after like eleven o'clock at night what you had to do to book the spot you had to have a tape that you could put they could put into their deck Comcast had a deck, it was a super VHS deck you had to give him a tape they had four slots and they could run whatever tape was on so somebody only wanted thirty minutes that would be one slot and somebody else's thirty minutes that's an hour and between twelve and i think six they could run as many as six hours of programming however they only had three and a half hours of programming and then this channel would The there's just nothing else to run they had no water automation or anything though i purchased seven days a week the twelve that's when the rate dropped to nothing twelve to one a m so i was broadcasting twelve to one every day of the week three hundred sixty five days a year for years and i do what i think it was cheap with all the channels it ended up costing about a hundred grand a year uh... too but i got so many phone calls and so many sales because i was or than the parties and the show was was so well received that it got me into the uh... broadcast the hall of fame which was really nice so the infomercial our original and the last one is the 30-minute show which in fact is cut to 28.5, 28.3. It was filmed on a Sony camera and edited in the camera. So if we made an error, we had little buttons on the camera, you could back up and start filming again. So there's some abrupt jumps occasionally, one or two jumps here, a clip of a half of a word. There was nothing we could do about it but that's the way it was. uh... we sat down at with kurt i think it was in the maker which put titles on including animation he can make these little tiles and each super eight vhs tape we struck uh... was done right from the original eight millimeter file with a high band eight millimeter that we filmed it on the cable stations because there were a lot of them We had to make maybe ten super VHSs and they would start to decay after a while. So about every two or three years we'd have to dig out the thing and make more. Now eventually I took the high band eight to a company that would make their own copies. They started asking for U-matics and beta tapes, beta max. and uh... then we had to do closed captioning when we put the hour show out in 2002 the federal requirements said every program had to be closed captioned if it was run on any channel at all so there was a company out in pittsburgh you send the tape to or you send the files to and then they will write a script of what you say I was sort of wondering how they would do The but you would then they would type it in and it would appear on the screen if you Ask the thing to be closed captioned and then they would strike a Betamax. So I was making believe it or not up until