![]() Walking through his new facilities on a Thursday morning, he spots a “Twin Rifle” shooting game. While still in high school, Arnold had 12 machines in one of the first Domino’s Pizza shops in the country. The brothers made enough money that they soon were adding more games in laundromats, pizza parlors and frat houses. They put it in their parents’ garage, and before long, all the neighbor kids were stopping by to play. He bought his first one with brother Tom and a family friend, Mike Reynolds, for $150 in 1972. Three years later came the pinball machines. ![]() Midwest native Tim Arnold was 14 when he invested in those candy dispensers as his first moneymaking venture. Like so many dreams, this one started with a few gumball machines in Michigan back in 1969. 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. “Financially, we shouldn’t have done this,” Arnold says, taking in his new digs. 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. 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. “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. “People will walk down a row of games and they’ll just stop dead. “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. ![]() That happens sometimes at the Pinball Hall of Fame. 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. Cheese or that neighborhood bowling alley, wherever you first started feeding your allowance into Ms. ![]() Stroll through - you’ll see it, absorb it - get wormholed back to Chuck E. The voluminous, white-walled room isn’t even half full yet, and already it’s loaded with remembrance. Baskow/Las Vegas Review-Journal) feels like an airplane hangar of memories. The Pinball Hall of Fame will house around 700 games when fully stocked in the months and years to come. ![]()
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