#Pinball museum vegas movie#

Stroll through - you’ll see it, absorb it - get wormholed back to Chuck E. Cheese or that neighborhood bowling alley, wherever you first started feeding your allowance into Ms. Pac-Man or whatever quarter-gobbler it was that sucked the change from your pockets back in the day.Īnd then you just might freeze in your tracks. That happens sometimes at the Pinball Hall of Fame. “We have what we call ‘nostalgia lockup,’ ” explains owner Tim Arnold, his wispy gray hair much longer than his patience for such modern distractions as cellphones, which he refuses to own. “People will walk down a row of games and they’ll just stop dead.

#Pinball museum vegas movie#

“In your mind, everything that’s ever amused you is in there somewhere,” he observes, “but you’ve forgotten about it … until you see that machine.”įor 15 years, the Pinball Hall of Fame has been a portal to the past for tens of thousands of visitors annually, a maze of machines that take your money and give you something ephemeral and lasting at once: a good time in the moment that simultaneously conjures the glow of good times had in years gone by.Ī nonprofit organization, the hall also has donated millions to local charities.Īfter opening his first location in a run-down strip mall next to a discount movie theater on Tropicana Avenue in 2006, Arnold moved down the street to a larger spot three years later. Now he has just opened the doors on a massive, new $10 million complex across from the “Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas” sign on Las Vegas Boulevard. It’s taken Arnold, wife Charlotte and a cast of volunteers decades to get here.Īnd now they and their fellow “pinheads” of the world have their palace, built 25 cents at a time.

“Financially, we shouldn’t have done this,” Arnold says, taking in his new digs. But our ego - and the fact that we really wanted to see something spectacular - kind of took over.” “We should have just stayed on Trop and rotated games in and out and let people have a different show every time by doing it that way. Like so many dreams, this one started with a few gumball machines in Michigan back in 1969. Midwest native Tim Arnold was 14 when he invested in those candy dispensers as his first moneymaking venture. Three years later came the pinball machines. He bought his first one with brother Tom and a family friend, Mike Reynolds, for $150 in 1972. They put it in their parents’ garage, and before long, all the neighbor kids were stopping by to play. The brothers made enough money that they soon were adding more games in laundromats, pizza parlors and frat houses. While still in high school, Arnold had 12 machines in one of the first Domino’s Pizza shops in the country. Walking through his new facilities on a Thursday morning, he spots a “Twin Rifle” shooting game. “I had one of these in a pizza parlor, and I made more money than my friends did on their whole paper route,” he says. I went out and bought a van, so I could deliver these to more pizza parlors and frat houses.” “Then, when you got old enough to get a job, they wanted to get a job at the car dealer washing cars or at McDonald’s. In 1977, Tim and Tom Arnold, their younger brother Ted and Reynolds opened their first arcade, Pinball Pete’s, which would eventually expand to seven locations throughout their native Michigan.Īrnold spent a few years in community college pursuing a career in television or radio before jettisoning his studies.

“I was making more money working part time hustling pinball than I would if I had got my degree and got a job,” he explains.

“I figured out that I could do this, and it’s like being in show business if you do it right. He estimated to have lost $500,000 in the 12 weeks of government-mandated closure due to COVID.He packed up 1,000 games and headed west.īoth Las Vegas and the Pinball Hall of Fame loomed on the horizon. All employees at the Pinball Hall of Fame are volunteers, and Arnold said he has sold dozens of machines to cut costs. The new location is expected to have 700 pinball and arcade machines. “The new building is now 96 percent finished, and we find that because (of) an almost total collapse of the tourist traffic in Las Vegas, we are going to fall short of having the money to finish,” Arnold wrote. The new location on Las Vegas Boulevard was expected to open in the spring, but Arnold is expected to vacate the Tropicana location by May 6, he wrote on the online fundraiser. The museum is still welcoming customers on East Tropicana Avenue, where it has sat for 11 years.

(Elizabeth Page Brumley/Las Vegas Review-Journal) Pinball Hall of Fame says it needs help keeping a roof over the museum’s head.įounder Tim Arnold started an online campaign Friday in hopes of raising $200,000 to finish construction on the museum’s new Las Vegas Boulevard location. Individuals are seen in the Pinball Hall of Fame during the launch of a weekly food truck gathering in their parking lot, Saturday, Dec.