THE MOM & POP COIN-OP SHOP
	November 2003

by Craig Rogers
Photos by Brad Shifflett

The distraught woman came sobbing to Dave Liotta’s house one night and began begging him to find some way to help her husband find some escape from his addiction. It was a disturbing experience for Dave, who has both a hobby and a business in buying and restoring old coin-operated entertainment machines.

Dave said that he had shared his passion for collecting coin-operated machines with the unfortunate woman’s husband a few years before, and the guy subsequently became so caught up in the hobby that collecting and working on game machines had become his whole life.

The Need for Balance
I had a conversation last month with Dave and his partner, Bob English. The two men gave their business of restoring old coin-operated entertainment devices the unlikely name “The Mom & Pop Coin-Op Shop.” Dave and Bob are a couple of interesting characters and they told me some fascinating things about the hobby of collecting these kinds of machines.

The guys talked about how some collectors develop such an addiction to the adrenaline-rush they get from the rich world of coin-op machine collecting that they end up completely withdrawing from the real world.

The story Dave told about the crying woman isn’t that unusual. This hobby, in fact, can be so interesting that it exerts a terribly unhealthy attraction to the more compulsive collector types. Some people begin by buying a single collectible piece and end up a few years later building additions to their houses so they can store the burgeoning collections that they are amassing. When serious overflow conditions occur, some individuals try to store their game machines in other people’s houses, dropping them off with the plaintive appeal, “Can I come over here, from time to time, and play on my game?”

In some cases the unfortunate souls end up not seeing much of their families. Their heads wind up stuck inside the back of a pinball game while their lawns turn into a dandelion wilderness and their kids run around crying with their diapers full.

Bob said he was passionate about the hobby, but declared, “I don’t believe that I am obsessed.” I guess he might have added, “I can quit anytime I want.”

Getting into the Games
Long ago I discovered that it is always fun to have a discussion with people who really know what they are talking about, and it hardly matters what their area of expertise is. I’ve been following coin-operated game machine collecting myself for quite a while, but made some interesting discoveries during the course of our conversation.

A glance into this hobby should be interesting even for people who don’t plan themselves to become collectors. You might realize by the end of this article how a person could become addicted to this stuff.

Development of the Coin-Op Game Industry
The history of coin-operated game machines goes back farther than the casual observer might ever imagine. Dave and Bob talked about the original pinball games, which started at least as long ago as the early 1920s. Those ancient games consisted of marbles inside simple square boxes. The first games were called shakers since the direction of the ball was controlled by shaking the game from side-to-side. Power for the early machines came from enormous drycell batteries, since these games were often placed in bars and other locations so far from civilization that, in those pre-electrification days, they lacked electricity.

The early pinball games incorporated some of the first mechanical computers. Complicated mechanical relays used binary “gate” logic, which lies at the heart of the electronic processing that goes on inside today’s most advanced super-computers. Some of the early game machines were made in Germany and Italy but the real history of games and jukeboxes is an American Story. We were the best at that stuff.

The older games were especially popular because people used them for gambling purposes. This was before television and people had a more difficult way of life. They needed whatever entertainment and diversion they could find. The first flipper games belonged to a set of computers in a fairy-tale series. Six games were produced in the series with themes like Ali Baba, Humpty Dumpty, Lady Robin Hood, Old King Cole, and Cinderella.

Gottlieb and Co. produced a series of superior games in the 60s. For example, a game called Kings and Queens had a superb configuration of the play-field. Specials would light up after you hit a given number of targets producing cascading levels of play advancement. The longer you played the more complicated the playing field would grow. The game was amazing!

In the 50s and 60s the drive for realism became so important that manufacturers designed shooting games with such a realistic recoil that the games would sometimes give a black eye to unprepared kids who pulled the trigger while holding their face too close to the gunsight.

Dave told us that in those days before consumer watchdog agencies came into their own, ungrounded games near swimming pools used to give them shocks. He remembers jumping out of a pool and reaching towards a game to put a quarter in it and getting a surprise so violent that it is still fresh in his mind. That was 40 years ago!

During the latter part of the 70s, electronic games began replacing the older mechanical machines. Huge elaborate mechanical games began to segue to electronic versions. Some games actually came out in both electronic and mechanical versions. These are currently high-ticket collectible items. If a modern collector could acquire both the mechanical and the electronic version of Fireball, for example, he would have a valuable set.

Issues of Quality and Function
People buy these things in flea markets and then give them to the Coin-Op Shop for repair. Later they come and pick up their restored entertainment machine and they say, “We can’t believe this. It is better than we ever imagined!”

Dave and Bob talked about how much satisfaction they derive from restoring old entertainment machines to like-new condition. Because of their love for these things they tend to do more than they have to. They told me that some people say, “We just want it to work.” But then the guys go ahead and do things like put sealer on the back glass and fix the minor problems that the owner might never have noticed. They told me that they like to turn over to people quality restored devices they can be proud of.

There’s a lot involved in even the simpler coin-operated entertainment machines. In many cases they are terribly complicated devices. Dave and Bob often have to study old machines carefully and try to figure out, “What is this part of the game supposed to do?”

There aren’t any design manuals for these things, of course, so when part of a game isn’t working the guys are left with the task of trying to uncover the nature of the play from the logic of the circuits, as well as from the layout of the table. They have to do detective work to deduce how the more complicated sequences of play work together. What actually has to happen, for example, before this light opens here, or that gate closes there?

Dave and Bob are able to restore an old game to better than new condition. However, Bob says he sometimes prefers games to look like they have a history. Scars and cigarette burns only lend authenticity and help connect collectors to a past that seems more alive because of the evidence people left behind of their contact with the machines being restored. Sometimes nicks and stains are to be treasured.

Classic Pop-Art
Dave and Bob told me that most people don’t realize that when restoring old pinball games the artwork is as important as the parts involved in playing the game. The art on these machines, in many cases, represents the work of notable artists of their time. A famous artist named Parker, for example, did a lot of the artwork for games in the 60s. In some cases, in fact, hobbyists will buy these machines just to get the art work from the back glass (which is the name for the main vertical panel on the back of the machine).

The art on each machine to an amazing extent reflects the period of time when it was built. Styles varied sharply from decade-to-decade. Once you become familiar with these things you can easily tell the difference between games that were produced in the 50s, for example, and those produced in the 60s.

The artwork on the older machines was applied using silk-screen processes. The artwork produced in this way is distinctive and impossible to reproduce. Factories would sometimes use fancy production techniques to splatter paint on machines that were covered by enormous stencils in such a way as to create strange, bleeding boundaries between the colors, that are impossible to exactly reproduce on a restored machine.

Pinball machines commonly display art themes from other entertainment media. For example, a number of games were built on themes from the movies. Some highly collectible pinball games show Vargas Girls, racehorses, or cowboys. One hugely popular game was called Playboy and displayed pictures of Hugh Heffner and Barbara Benton in the background with pictures of Playboy bunnies scattered all over the game.

An Outrageous Display of Moral Outrage
In 1941 there was a moral backlash against the pinball industry. In one highly publicized incident the then-mayor of New York, Mayor LaGuardia, put thousands of confiscated games on a barge, smashed them, and dumped them all in the East River. This was a black day in the memories of pinball machine hobbyists. Dave and Bob have a picture showing Mayor LaGuardia on a barge taking a sledge hammer to those beautiful games, and they say that the picture touches a painful chord in every collector’s heart.

The mayor destroyed a lot of wonderful machines and sent a lot of beautiful artwork to the bottom of the river. He probably thought he was doing the work of the Lord, but the wanton destruction of such beautiful and irreplaceable objects was the work of a Philistine in the opinion of most collectors.

To Strange Places in Search of Treasure
Dave and Bob say that the search for collectibles has led them to many strange places. In response to their ads they said they would get calls to go to some locations off the beaten path. Dave said that some of the places they had to go to made them feel like they were on the set of Deliverance; he said they were apprehensively waiting for those strange redneck boys to start circling.

Some of the greatest fun in this hobby is the search. It’s really thrilling to get out and find wonderful things in strange places. Perhaps the greatest treasures might be right under our noses. We just don’t know where. A story is going around about a huge building packed with games that some guy bought from a video game manufacturer.

The hobby has some great legends, some of which might be true. For example, there are bunkers on the other side of the 680 bridge, by the junction with 780. The bunkers were military, but are now being used for civilian storage. When 7-11 took the games out of their stores, the legend has it that some guys put all of them into those bunkers. So there’s a big mystery in the industry about this. What happened with those games? Are they still there?

Sad Death of a Wonderful Industry
The companies that make pinball games and other coin-operated entertainment systems are going out of business. However, the market for the old mechanical games — the real collectibles — remains alive and well. Companies that are manufacturing and marketing parts for these are going strong.

The bottom is currently falling out of the gaming industry. The world of electronic gaming is experiencing an enormous migration away from malls and plazas and onto home computer systems and TV-based video games. Commercial designs for fast-food restaurants and convenience stores don’t even have places to put video games anymore. The Aladdin Castles are all closing down, the Playlands are moving out, and a wonderful era is coming to an end.

Nevertheless, the fact remains that the old coin-operated entertainment systems are attractive even to today’s young people. Dave and Bob say they often will watch ten-year old boys walk up to one of their games, pull back the shooter, and become immediately captivated in watching the course of the ball through the play field.

Part of the fascination a modern young person finds in these machines probably comes from the novelty of seeing actual objects moving around under his control, as opposed to the modern games that implement electronic control over virtual objects.

Come to think about it, that’s what fascinates many of us, perhaps.

The feel of the shooter beneath your fingers;
... the sense of anticipation as the ball begins rolling down the play board;
... the exciting sounds of the ringing of bells and the chunking of the ball against the bumpers;
... the satisfaction of flipping the ball back into the safety of the upper part of the play board;
... the thrill of finally hitting the gate that opens up new levels of scoring;
... the delight of pushing the score up into previously unattained regions....

I’m going to quit writing this now and go play on my pinball game for a while.

Craig has been a collector for 12 years. He writes as a Contributing Editor for 110° magazine. You can reach him at gaspump@pacbell.net