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Tilt
Christopher Helman 05.21.07

Tim Arnold turned his pinball obsession into a small fortune. Now he's
using his pile to preserve pinball.



>From 11 a.m. to midnight, six days a week, you can find Tim J. Arnold


tending to the 200 pinball machines in his arcade. Called the Pinball
Hall of Fame, it's three miles from the Las Vegas Strip, next to a
shuttered movie theater.

In a grubby T shirt, with a long ponytail and Coke-bottle glasses,
Arnold, 51, looks like the nerdy kid who never grew up. He usually has
his head buried in the guts of a vintage machine, maybe fixing a
flipper on Mata Hari.


The games in the arcade are the cream of his 1,200-machine collection,
which Arnold began in 1970 and estimates is the best in the world
(he's probably right). "You can't go on the Internet and play these
games," he says. Which is why today's youngsters mostly can't be
bothered with such mechanical contrivances. "Kids come in here looking
for violent kung-fu videogames and stomp out." Such attitudes
complicate Arnold's goal: to make sure his collection lives on, open
to the public, long after he is gone.


He operates the arcade as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, so he pays no taxes
on what the machines bring in. Revenue averages $12,800 a month, more
than enough to cover $4,500 in rent and $2,500 in electric bills--at
least for now. But in March the movie theater next door went out of
business, taking with it much of Arnold's foot traffic.


For a decade he has earmarked half the profits for the organization's
building fund, now $400,000. The other half ($350,000 so far) he
donates to the Salvation Army. His inspiration is a weathered copy of
a 1991 FORBES story that extolled the Army's streamlined and
parsimonious ways. "They're like us. Low-rent, downtown, highly
efficient; and if anybody's paid, they're not paid much."


Witness to that are the arcade's dark blue carpet (salvaged from a
Vegas convention hall), mismatched ceiling tiles and a change machine
that Arnold scavenged from a dumpster behind the Golden Nugget casino.


The arcade's tax status helped him persuade the Las Vegas county
commissioner (a pinball fan) to arrange a waiver of the $70-per-
machine licensing fee. Arnold doesn't draw a salary. He doesn't need
to: Pinball has already made him prosperous.


His obsession started with Mayfair, the first machine he ever bought--
for $200 in 1970 when he was 14. He installed it in his parents'
garage and was soon milking neighborhood kids for dimes. When he was
15 his mother would drive him to his job fixing pinball machines at
pool halls and later at the D�j� Vu strip club in East Lansing, Mich.
He thought nothing of riding 60 miles on his motorcycle to play a new
game. He tried going to college for a while but hated it.


In 1976 he opened the first of what would become seven locations in
his Pinball Pete's arcade chain. The economics were awesome. He would
pay $1,800 to buy a new machine, which would then suck in $400 a week
in quarters. Michigan had no sales tax on pinball, and there were no
permits required. "It's no wonder that pinball started off as a bandit
industry run by the mob," says Arnold. "I've had conversations with
drug dealers about who had the more lucrative business. With arcades,
once you deal in your silent partner, Uncle Sam, you don't have to
worry about laundering your money."


When tastes turned to video, Arnold lost interest in arcades. But by
the time he sold out to his younger brother in 1990, Arnold had
accumulated $4 million in savings, one quarter at a time. "We wore out
steel ice-cream scoops shoveling quarters," he says.


In 1991 he crisscrossed the nation, stopping at old arcades, chatting
up owners who would sell dusty machines out of backrooms for $50. A
daunting challenge (in those pre-Internet days) was simply to cobble
together a list of all the games ever made. He was shocked to discover
that even some of the manufacturers hadn't kept track of all their
titles.


At a Chicago pinball expo Arnold met a former designer for Gottlieb &
Co., one of the biggest makers. The man handed him a record of the
production runs on every game Gottlieb ever made. This was Arnold's
Rosetta stone. Now he knew which machines were so scarce that he
should buy them on sight, no matter what their state of disrepair, and
which were plentiful enough that he could hold out for a pristine
copy.


He acquired most of the games for less than $100 each. Today they
might cost $3,000. The rarest, made by Gottlieb in 1951, is worth
$20,000. Glamor was a dud in its own day but is valuable now because
Gottlieb made only 300 copies. It's often confused with Bally's
Glamour, a better game, which you can find for $4,000.


Gottlieb, founded in 1927, helped spawn a cottage industry in Chicago,
where for decades big companies like Bally and Williams built their
machines and sourced their parts within a dozen blocks of one another.
The "tilt" mechanism, disqualifying scores boosted by jostling the
game, was introduced in 1934. In 1947 Gottlieb began a revolution with
Humpty Dumpty, the first game with finger-operated flippers.


TKO was the last all-mechanical model, designed by Gottlieb in 1978.
But with digital displays becoming dominant, it was never mass-
produced. A worker saved prototype pieces from Gottlieb's crusher.
These made their way to Arnold. A clandestine source provided Arnold
with the original schematics. It took him a year to engineer the
wiring and piece the game together.


Gottlieb went out of business in 1996. Bally and Williams stopped
making pinball machines in 2000. Chicago company Stern is the lone
holdout. Its most recent machine (Arnold's top revenue generator) is
based on the animated television program Family Guy. The arcade's
number two seller is the exquisite four-level machine called Pinball
Circus, of which Williams in 1993 made only two before deciding it was
too costly to mass-produce.


In 1991 Arnold and his wife, Charlotte, moved the collection to Las
Vegas, partly because the warm, dry weather was easier on his machines
but mostly to be part of the spectacle. "I liked the Strip back then;
it was still run by showmen," says Arnold. The Golden Nugget still had
a showcase with the world's biggest gold nugget, and Binion's still
had $1 million worth of $10,000 bills on display.


Today the Pinball Hall of Fame has three years left on its lease. And
after that? For years Arnold has tried to persuade some wealthy
pinball fans to donate a building to the cause. So far, no luck.
Meanwhile, the Smithsonian has said it isn't interested in the
collection, either. No matter what, Arnold insists the games have to
stick together. "People offer to buy them all the time, but I'm
resigned in my own mind that the collection will never be for sale.
They're my friends, and I don't sell my friends. I couldn't do it
again. I couldn't replace them."
By the Numbers


Good games for new collectors.


$4,000 Captain Fantastic, 1976


$5,000 The Addams Family, 1992


$6,000 Pirates of the Caribbean, 2006


$7,000 Star Trek, 1978

Good article, thanks for sharing it. Frank.

$4 Million in quarters ?!?!?

Wow, that's ALOT of coin
(...figuratively and matter-of-fact-ly ! )

It must be nice being a Millionaire playing pinball
(...living in Vegas with 1200 machines no less !  )

... and here we are, nickel-and-diming each other to death over pins,
and agonizing over space shortages...

Some guys have all the luck !



Cheers,
Steph

I heard a story from a friend once that a local op here in Toronto actually had his cadillac fitted with air ride to support the weight of the quarters in the trunk. He even had his own enterance at the rear of the bank.

Yeah,

I knew Tim Arnold must have been doing pretty good to have all those pins, but I always wondered how he acquired them all.  I also had no idea he has made the money he has through pinball and arcade games.  I think he definitely found his niche.  

Watched an episode of Miami Ink a while back and one of the tatooists was at Tim Arnold's Pinball Museum admiring some of his machines and he expressed an interest in a Space Invader's arcade game and Tim Arnold quoted him a price of $3000 (and that's in US dollars).  Wasn't able to finish watching this episode and kinda wondered if he sold it or not?

You said you thought this guy was lucky Steph.  Yeah, well I'm sure luck has a little to do with it, but he also had a lot of forsight and business sense.  He bought tonnes of machines for next to nothing, convinced the beaurocrats in L.V. to waive the licencing fees on the games in his museum and if that wasn't enough he's found ways to have others help pay his rent.  And as far as the games mentioned in the article above, I'm sure if you were interested he would sell you one at the price listed.  

                                                   flashman

    

WTF crack addict $7k Star Trek?

You know you wanna play it.

To quote the Grand Kung Fu Master in the cult classic movie Kung Pow, Enter the Fist:

" What in God's name is that thing??? "

That is the first time I see a full pic of Pinball Circus... You know what I find funny? I have been hearing people crap on Pinball2000 pins (OK, SWE1 does suck, but...) stating that it is not real pinball, and the same people say amazing thing of this machine and that it was a shame that they didn't make it.

Huh??? WTF????  

No offense, but this thing looks like someone genetically melded together a Varkon, a glorified gumball machine, and a Mouse Trap boardgame. Ball flow? WHAT ball flow? ... Looks like the ball spends more time on the gadgets than in front of the flippers where you actually PLAY pinball. Looks like all bark, no bite, but then again, hard to tell from just a picture...

Quoted from Sparky

No offense, but this thing looks like someone genetically melded together a Varkon, a glorified gumball machine, and a Mouse Trap boardgame. Ball flow? WHAT ball flow? ... Looks like the ball spends more time on the gadgets than in front of the flippers where you actually PLAY pinball. Looks like all bark, no bite, but then again, hard to tell from just a picture...

No, that description is about right....



Cheers,
Steph

Sparky, it's not right to judge by pictures...

I played it in Chicago 2 years ago...it's interesting, but it's HUGE...

I actually completed all levels and got my initials on the machine...

I've played worse pinball machines than this, but I must admit that yes, it's a "one trick pony".

Mes deux cennes,
Frosken

Yeah, Pinball Circus was a hot one when I was at the PHoF back in March.  I couldn't even get near it to play a game or two with all the people waiting to play!!  Interesting to say the least.....

Doug

Like I said you want to "play" it as opposed to own it you pin snobs.

Mouse Trap is a good analogy. That brings back memories. There was anouther game like that I got as a kid called Crazy Clock. Never see it anymore.



http://www.lifesizemousetrap.com/

Quoted Text

There was anouther game like that I got as a kid called Crazy Clock. Never see it anymore.

Thats because the lead they used to create the board game figures in the 1890's is outlawed today