The world’s first pinball machine appeared in 1931, costing a penny to play. Eleven years later, games were so popular that people began betting on their outcome— prompting a ban on pinball in New York and several other cities.
Many technical improvements followed once a lawsuit made pinball legal again. The addition of flippers, colorful art and sound effects made the games more challenging and fun.
Today, computerized games with high resolution visuals are available on home computers and tablets, but a market remains for the old machines and arcades.
“People who have seen these machines, back in the 80’s, 90’s and 2000’s, they see the games and they say, ‘Oh, I want to play that, because I played that in my childhood.’”
Lindsey Daniels is manager of Decades Arcade in Charlottesville— a curated collection of about 130 games, many acquired by a highly skilled surgeon at UVA.
“Our owner, his name is Paul, but others know him as Dr. Yates, he is a practicing physician at UVA— a retinal surgeon. He uses fixing pinball machines and arcade cabinets as his stress reliever,” says Daniels.
For kids, she says, these games offer a different experience – the chance to play with friends in person.
“It is a much more enjoyable experience for a lot of them to be able to have a party in person with all their friends and play video games in person. There’s not as much of that culture of going over to someone’s house to play video games as there used to be.”
Many parents or grandparents delight in sharing one of their first loves with kids. Dr. Yates wanted to provide a space for family-friendly recreation when, in 2018, he and Daniels opened their first arcade in a warehouse near downtown Charlottesville. But as word spread, they had to move.
“Customers were wanting a party room, and all of us wanted air conditioning, which we didn’t have there,” Daniels remembers.
Their current location, on the downtown mall, features a series of rooms and corridors, including an old bomb shelter in the basement. It houses pinball machines up to 70 years old. Daniels enjoys showing off those antiques and offering lessons in science, technology, engineering and math or STEM.
“I love to open up a pinball machine and show people inside. I tend to do this for field trips or if anyone is excited about it. Pinball teaches you so much about everything in STEM. There’s a lot of physics, there’s a lot of mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, and so, I can teach people about what that world was like before computers, because increasingly people don’t know what the world was like before computers, right?”
The enterprise relies on a team of pinball and video game enthusiasts – some of them volunteers who love the old machines and know how to keep them going.
“The arcade only exists because of a bunch of different people who have very specific skills," says Daniels. "I have one guy who does video games. I have one guy who does pinball machines before computers, one guy who does pinball machines after computers, and then I have Josh, and he does video games and consoles, and he’s been doing this ever since he was a kid and would sit at home and take apart a Nintendo and clean it and figure out why it was breaking and put it all back together again.”
The cost is $12 per person for two hours, or $17 for the day. On a rainy Saturday, Daniels notes the place is approaching capacity— 125 people.
And managers in other cities, from Norfolk to Roanoke, Fredericksburg and Richmond to Danville have also discovered that there’s still a place for pinball and other historic games.
