He likes to buy one of every new pinball machine that comes out today to not only stay current with what people want but also to support pinball factories.Īrnold said he was outgrowing the previous location when he learned about a unique opportunity to acquire land on the Strip in 2018. Arnold's nonprofit organization, the Las Vegas Pinball Collectors Club, has donated $1 million to local charities. The older games are generally cheaper newer games are generally more expensive. Half of the games cost a quarter the other half cost 50 cents, 75 cents or a dollar to play. The Pinball Hall of Fame contains machines from every decade since the 1930s. The new space can accommodate as many as 1,000 machines and other arcade favorites. Only about 250 machines filled the previous 8,600-square-foot site on Tropicana Avenue that the Pinball Hall of Fame occupied since 2009. You see people just enthralled by what they're doing." "What you see are miserable mooks sitting on chairs pushing buttons. "You don't really see people jumping up and down and having fun and screaming and having a flashback, "Arnold said. It's kind of hard to miss the new home of the Pinball Hall of Fame on Las Vegas Boulevard South. He draws a sharp contrast between playing slot machines and pinball machines. With the more convenient location on the south Strip, he expects that number to rise to 75%. And that's something that people honestly enjoy."Ībout 65% of those who came to the Pinball Hall at its most recent off-Strip site were tourists, Arnold says. But this shows our product is something that people want. "We see that every day," he said "We laugh about it. I kissed a girl,'" Arnold said, mimicking the halting speech of guests overcome with happy sentimentality. The machine I was playing the first time I. They'll sit there and point at the machine, 'So. "They see it again, and all these memories come flooding back. "They walk past a machine that they've completely forgotten about," Arnold said. He started inviting people to play them in his backyard and has moved the collection to increasingly larger facilities.Īrnold and his volunteers draw satisfaction seeing guests walk down a row of pinball machines that prompt "nostalgia lockup," when they revisit fond memories of their youth. This is actually the fourth iteration of the Pinball Hall of Fame for Arnold, a retired arcade operator who moved machines he collected through the years from Michigan to Las Vegas in the early 1990s. Uniworld Boutique River Cruise Collection. But thanks to strict pandemic-era rules, nonstops. and Asia are up dramatically from last summer.
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