Question of the Day - 20 September 2022

Tim Arnold has been an avid pinball player for upwards of 60 of his 66 years.

He bought his first machine when he was 14, a 1966 Gottlieb game, “Mayfair,” for $165 in Lansing, Michigan, where he grew up. He charged his friends and neighborhood kids 10 cents to play. His success with the Gottlieb prompted Tim to invest in more used machines. Of necessity and desire, he taught himself how to repair them and in fairly short order started placing them in laundromats, pizza parlors, arcades, and the like around Lansing.

At the age of 20, Tim and his younger brother Ted opened their first pinball arcade, Pinball Pete’s, in Lansing near Michigan State University. The late ’70s were the heyday of coin-operated machines, as arcade video games were all the rage (Pong showed up in 1972, Space Race 1973, Gun Fight 1975, and Pac-Man 1980); the Who’s “Pinball Wizard” was a huge hit for Elton John in 1974. Tim and Ted cashed in big time on the craze. According to Tim’s official biography, “By 1982, Tim and Ted were shoveling quarters into five-gallon pails and taking them to the bank.”

Eventually, Tim and Ted had seven arcades around Michigan. But it didn’t take long for Tim to tire of running them and he made so much money in the ’80s that he sold his interest in the business to his brother and with his partner Charlotte Owens, he retired, at the ripe old age of 35, to Las Vegas with $1 million invested.

All along, Arnold wanted to open a public venue devoted entirely to pinball and, as he told the Los Angeles Times in 2008, that would work only in tourist destinations. New York and L.A. were too expensive and Orlando was too humid for his taste; the Las Vegas Strip “resembled a pinball game’s playfield.” He and Owens bought a house here on 2.5 acres.

Tim had collected more than 1,000 pinball machines over the past 20 or so years. The trade-in value of the old machines was negligible, so he stored them and soon enough had one of the largest collections in the world. It took two years to move most of the machines to Las Vegas (Lansing is 2,000 miles away), storing them in his house and garage, on his back porch, and around his unused tennis court under tarps. The next step was to construct a 10,000-square-foot warehouse on his property where for the next 10 years, he repaired and restored around 400 machines.  

In the interim, he started hosting pinball gatherings for friends, neighbors, and helpers in the warehouse. In 1995, Tim and Charlotte opened up the gatherings during the Amusement Machine Operators Association trade show and soon, the events grew so large that he had to buy the vacant lot next door to put up a parking lot for the 1,000 or so attendees.

Tim used the events, along with selling restored machines, to raise money for charity, in particular the Salvation Army, while also starting the Las Vegas Pinball Collectors Club to raise more funds to open the first Pinball Hall of Fame. But by 2005, the gatherings were too big for Tim and Charlotte to handle.

Finally, in 2006, Arnold bought a 9,000-square-foot building on E. Tropicana and opened the first Pinball Hall of Fame to the public, with 250 machines occupying half the square footage, including one of only two Pinball Circus machines ever made. 

Of course, PHoF outgrew that building and after another fundraising effort, the Club bought a parcel on the south Strip a bit north of the Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas sign for $4.5 million, with plans to open a single-story 27,000-square-foot building with enough space for 600-700 pinball machines, more than double the capacity of the old building.

Everything was going according to plan, with construction 95% complete, when the pandemic shutdown cut into the PHoF's cash flow to the tune of $500,000 and the Club found itself $200,000 short of funds to complete the building. Ever resourceful, Arnold sold dozens of machines, launched a GoFundMe page, and solicited private contributions to get out of the jam.

The fundraising campaign stalled at $130,000, but then an anonymous donor stepped up with a $79,000 check to achieve the goal.

Finally, in April 2021, 13 months after the shutdown, the new Pinball Hall of Fame held a soft opening, then a grand opening just before July 4th of that year on “Pinball Hall of Fame Day."

Through it all, Tim Arnold has run his business as a non-profit, using volunteer labor and donating all the profits. As he told an interviewer, “It's all about pinball and charity.”