The pastime of pinball has lived a fraught existence. Whether due to public sentiment, hostile legislation, or a simple lack of popularity, the entire silver ball industry has repeatedly teetered on the brink of collapse. Yet it has always come back, today again riding a wave of popularity driven by the successes of high-tech machines capitalizing on familiar brands like X-Men and Godzilla.
Pinball arcades are springing up everywhere, but private ownership is also surging. Those modern tables with their high-definition displays and brilliant LED lights are getting the most attention, but there is a breed of pinball enthusiast who not only owns a selection of classic machines but also obsessively maintains and restores them.
These collectors have just as much love for the maze of mechanicals beneath the surface as the trajectories the silver ball follows. The goal isn't high scores; it's keeping ornately complex vintage contraptions looking and playing like new.
That's an extreme challenge given some of those pinball machines date back to the 1940s and '50s, games designed to survive in the field for a year or two before being replaced. Keeping them properly flipping, dinging, and buzzing requires a good knowledge of electronics and a passion for troubleshooting—plus access to a dizzying array of specialized parts.
But one man, Steve Young, not only obsessively collects vintage pinball machines himself but has also acquired the dusty stockrooms and manufacturing components from the since-failed brands that built them. Over the past 50 years, he has built the world's greatest collection of rare parts and schematics that keep this detail-obsessed hobby humming. Along the way, he has also developed a unique way of running the business that has become The Pinball Resource.
Sourcing the Resource
Young doesn't really advertise these days, and finding his business, The Pinball Resource, is a little bit tricky. Yes, it's on Google Maps, but when you arrive at the building, you'll find just one small sign in a nondescript complex a few miles outside of Poughkeepsie, New York. It's situated between an auto repair shop and a beauty salon.
When I finally found the entrance, Young told me he intentionally keeps the signage to a minimum. He doesn't exactly want a lot of visitors.
A casual pinball fan might walk in expecting to see a room full of big-budget, licensed pinball machines, maybe a Jaws game sitting next to a John Wick, wedged in between any of a half-dozen Marvel-themed games, all blinking and blaring in full attract mode.
But The Pinball Resource doesn't have any of that on display. You're greeted by a couple of tired conference tables and endless filing cabinets. Yes, there are a few pinball machines in the next room, but they're half-covered in paper, serving as de facto cutting surfaces for the reprints of schematics and wiring diagrams duplicated by large-format printers.
Those repurposed machines date from the early 1950s, known as "wood rail" machines thanks to their reliance on maple and the like for much of their construction. Though simple by today's standards, the classic designs of these machines have earned them a legion of ardent fans.
"The art is fantastic," Young said, referencing a game called Knock Out, which dates from 1950. The machine depicts a boxing match, but there's far more fighting happening in the crowd, stylized brawls of all sorts. A clown is being led out on a stretcher. Shake the game too much, and a little speech bubble above his head lights up and says, "Tilt!"
Pinball machines at The Pinball Resource.
Credit:
Tim Stevens
This machine dates from the so-called Golden Age of pinball, each game a certified piece of Americana, most designed and manufactured in Chicago. The origin of pinball itself, though, is rather more exotic.
A brief history of pinball
For a game that feels refreshingly simple and two-dimensional compared to the latest PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X releases, pinball has a surprisingly tumultuous history, involving everything from organized crime to Supreme Court rulings.
Its roots date back to an 18th-century single-player form of billiards called bagatelle designed to give bored French nobility something to do when the croquet lawn was too soggy for the delicate heels of their buckle shoes. Players hit balls upward on an inclined table, angling shots to land in pockets and earn points.
That humble game (which also spawned pachinko) evolved into something played behind glass, with players launching silver balls with a spring-loaded plunger, nudging the game to get the balls into holes and earn points. Those holes were framed with pins, giving this odd pastime its eventual name.
By the 1930s, Chicago was the global epicenter of pinball. Games popped up in bars and corner stores across the US, gaining some unwanted attention along the way. Some religious leaders claimed pinball was a source of moral corruption, while some police said pinball was part of organized crime rings. It was banned or restricted in many municipalities. New York City Mayor Fiorello La Guardia's goons dragged hundreds of games out of businesses and smashed them in the streets in the 1940s, creating a sea of broken glass and shattered wood not seen since the prohibition's frothier demolitions a decade earlier.
Despite all that, pinball survived. Manufacturers implemented rule changes to stay within the law, but things really took off after a game called Humpty Dumpty in 1947 made a minor addition that changed everything: the flipper. Chance and skill were now more evenly balanced, and the game's popularity exploded again.
But it still was a game lingering under a shadow of dubious legality. It wasn't until 1976, when pinball guru Roger Sharpe famously called a shot on a machine set up in a New York state courtroom, that pinball was officially designated a game of skill, not chance. This led to most of the restrictions across the country falling. The game entered another wave of popularity, setting the stage for a new generation of machines using modern, solid-state electronics.
It was about this time that something else began: The Pinball Resource.
Becoming The Resource
Young's obsession with pinball dates back to the early '70s, when he was a college student at Lehigh University studying metallurgical engineering, a discipline that would eventually lead to a career at IBM. He and his friends became fascinated by the game.
"Being a bunch of engineers and math people and so forth, we got our fingers in there, and if we couldn't fix something, the tech came, and we'd watch him and learn from him," he said.
Eventually, Young and a friend began operating multiple machines, called "running a route" in the industry. "We had, like, 26 games out on campus at Lehigh. So, to maintain that, you've got to have parts." As Young's personal and professional pinball collections grew, so did his collection of parts, which he eventually started selling to others.
"By the time I graduated college, I had probably 30 or 40 games of my own outside of the games we were operating, and then I needed to maintain and fix those. And I kind of just stumbled into doing that, and I started advertising in some of the early magazines," Young said.
He took out an ad in Pinball Trader Newsletter, the biggest publication for the hobby at the time. The magazine's editor, Dennis Dodel, dubbed Young "The Pinball Resource."
"The name stuck," Young said.
Beneath the glass
If there's one thing you need to know about pinball machines, it's that they break—a lot. You'd never know it, thanks to the surprisingly effective sound-deadening properties of the glass under which it's played, but a game of pinball is shockingly violent. Each 80-gram silver ball gains remarkable inertia as it catapults from one target to another.
Remove the glass, fire up a game, and you'll quickly be reaching for some hearing protection. It's unpleasant, but playing like this is a good way to appreciate how much of a pounding a pinball machine takes every time you pull that plunger.
Factor into that hundreds of incandescent bulbs slowly baking all the machine's internals, plus grit and debris accumulating in every mechanism as the machine wears, and you have a recipe for something that needs a lot of attention to keep operating.
That violence made for short-lived games. "If you go back in the '50s, I think those games were designed for maybe 18 months on location, then they got traded back in," Young said. "Most big operators expected two or three years out of a game. Factories only supported them for five years."
Where modern, solid-state machines rely on software flashed to embedded systems, running on SoCs smaller than your thumbnail, earlier machines feature a far more convoluted set of mechanisms. These machines, called electromechanical (EM), instead rely on a series of discs and circuits to control the game's logic.
"This is like programming for electromechanical," Young said. "It's like programming a ROM, right? This is what made the game work the way it was supposed to work."
The workshop is full of parts for repairing machines.
Credit:
Tim Stevens
As the player progresses through the game, electric motors turn these wheels from one position to the next, advancing through different rules and bonuses.
Special when lit? Not if the wheel that controls that aspect of the game is missing or broken. But which discs go where, and in what orientation? Each game is a complex logic puzzle of circuits, switches, and relays, all connected through a wiring harness dizzying enough to make a rat seek shelter elsewhere.
Knowing how everything goes together requires extensive documentation and plenty of experience. Over the years, Young has gathered an unprecedented collection of both.
Keeping hope alive
Gottlieb is the most historically significant brand in pinball. This is the company that introduced the flipper in 1947 and kept making games through to the mid-'90s. It survived the big pinball downturn in the early '80s brought on by the arrival of arcade video games, but it couldn't weather the next drought.
"There's a cycle of pinball. It's like a seven-year cycle, ups and downs and so forth," Young said. "Peak might have been about 1992 if you look at the number of games produced. It was like 120,000 games." But, from there, Young said, it was a steady decline of roughly 10 percent per year.
"Gottlieb closed in '95, and they moved the parts to their distributorship in New Jersey, with the idea of setting up a parts department," Young said. But, the company quickly changed its mind.
Young eventually bought out Gottlieb's backlog of parts and numerous pieces of manufacturing equipment, operating a revenue share with the company for a time before taking outright control of the inventory. That's how The Pinball Resource became the de facto source for all things Gottlieb, but it wouldn't end there.
"We've picked up all these pieces as the pinball business has shrunk and fallen apart," Young said. "I sat down once with a yellow pad, and I started writing down the number of distributors that I bought their stock, right? And I filled the side of the page and turned the page over before I got done."
Along with the truckloads of parts and specialized equipment have also come stacks and stacks of schematics for all these machines, some bearing hand-drawn corrections penned by long-retired engineers. They all lie stacked and ordered in a series of wide cabinets.
"This is probably one of the world's largest collections of schematics," Young said. "Every Gottlieb schematic in the world is in that filing cabinet." Schematics from other manufacturers sit nearby, along with endless manuals covering games from many brands and eras. I told him that the 1986 Williams machine High Speed was my favorite. Ten seconds later, he had the original manual in hand.
These manuals tell you which components you need if your machine isn't working, but a part number someone scrawled onto a sheet of draft paper in 1953 won't do you much good if that part went out of production sometime during the Eisenhower administration.
Thankfully, Young has you covered there, too. The Pinball Resource didn't just buy the parts from Gottlieb and others but also used numerous pieces in manufacturing.
Young took me into the storage and manufacturing area within The Pinball Resource, featuring shelf after shelf of parts plus tables covered with specialized machines.
"I have a lot of tooling set up over the world," he said. Rubber rings are a perpetual consumable in pinball machines. The little bumpers that cushion impacts take a beating. The Pinball Resource manufactures its own rings in Taiwan, using tooling acquired from yet another company's bankruptcy. Other parts are manufactured at a facility in pinball's traditional home of Chicago.
One item the company assembles at the company's New York headquarters is called a pop bumper cap, the colorful mushroom-shaped dome that covers the circular bumpers often found in clusters of threes on pinball playfields. There's an endless variety of colors and designs, many featuring custom embossed logos.
Creating these requires a specialized press that drives a heated brass stamp to create the logo, a process called hot stamping. Young has hundreds of these stamps to emboss everything from the American flag to Medusa's head. Some are decades-old originals. Others are modern reproductions he's sourced from artists, each costing upward of $500 to create. Young sells the caps they produce for $5 or $6 each.
Mechanical components receive just as much attention, including presses and punches to create the endless shapes and sizes of electronic switches required to ensure a machine accurately keeps score.
And then there's the coils. Pinball machines rely on small coils of wound copper wire, electromagnets that eject a plunger that pushes or pulls a mechanism to send the silver ball flying in a new direction. Young buys thousands of pounds of copper wire to wind custom coils in numerous sizes, even coming up with custom high-power models to make slow old games faster.
Sometimes, they're too fast. "I have a regular pop bumper coil, and I have a 'hot' pop bumper coil, and the hot one is too hot, okay? So, I'm trying to hone in on what a medium should be," Young said. "Everybody likes a medium, right? So I really want a little warmer pop bumper coil, but not a hot one. I don't want the lights to dim when the bumper pulls in."
Young also refines and improves upon original pinball parts known for failing early and often, subtly adding thickness or reinforcement to ensure that stressed components better survive the rigors of gameplay. "We try to make the part authentic to the original part, or better," he said. "You make the part, you might as well make the part right."
Improvements like these are thanks not only to Young's metallurgical background in the field but also thanks to the feedback he gets courtesy of the uniquely hands-on approach he takes to dealing with customers.
Check, please
The Pinball Resource's website has a delightfully retro 1990s feel about it. Click your way through, and you'll find an endless list of parts and accessories in simple tables. What you won't find, though, is a "Buy it Now" button anywhere.
How do you order anything then? Well, you send an email or pick up the phone. Either way, don't be surprised if you hear from Young himself.
"I almost always call in my orders and talk to Steve. It's always informative and interesting. I'll only email an order for mundane supplies," Dave Golden told me. He's a Massachusetts-based pinball enthusiast who not only keeps busy maintaining his own collection of about 30 games but volunteers his time fixing machines at the ElectroMagnetic Pinball Museum in Rhode Island.
Golden estimates he's spent a couple of thousand dollars at The Pinball Resource since his first order in 2018, but plenty of Young's customers spend a lot more.
People like Levi Nayman, who runs Crazy Levi's Pinball, which restores and sells pinball machines in the metro New York area. He's been a Pinball Resource customer for over 20 years and has lost track of how much he's spent there buying hard-to-find parts. "I really have no idea, probably over $10k but it's not anything I've kept track of," he said.
What keeps Levi coming back? Steve Young. "He's got the stuff, the knowledge, and the personality," he said. "I also get my stuff overnight since it's so close."
Young fields questions from customers like Nayman every day, often firing a question or two right back at them.
Questions like: "Wait, what are you trying to do?"
With a complex system like a pinball machine, sometimes a misfiring coil or a flickering bulb can have a cause that's only tangentially related to the symptom. And so, Young frequently finds himself talking people out of ordering parts they don't need.
"I can't be comfortable taking people's money from lack of knowledge," he said. "I've had to be careful how I can do that because people take offense. 'You won't sell me that? What's the matter?' You know? 'Well, you really don't need it. Do this first.'"
Steve Young poring through the shop's resources.
Credit:
Tim Stevens
Regardless of which parts you order, you'll of course need to pay for them, and that leads to the final unusual aspect of The Pinball Resource's business model.
"I don't do credit cards. We don't do PayPal," Young said. Venmo, Zelle, and other digital forms of payment also rank on the no-fly list. Young takes checks, money orders, wire transfers, cash, and that's about it. These forms of payment can be slow, but orders don't wait: The Pinball Resource ships most orders before payment is received.
Young likens it to a sit-down restaurant, something that confuses a lot of new customers. "When you place your order, do you have to pay? Or, do you eat the meal first, and then they give you your check, and then you pay?" Young said. "People really appreciate the trust I place in them."
That attitude has earned The Pinball Resource a perfect five-star rating in online reviews from Google to Yelp, plus legions of loyal customers worldwide, each with a shared passion for keeping machines once considered disposable alive for the next generation to enjoy.
And that's what Young is dedicated to doing himself, though lately on a somewhat reduced scale. He's pared his personal collection of games down from over 200 to about 70. "I'm really focused on wood rails, so that kind of ends at 1960. And the more I work on them, the more my attention really narrows in on the span from maybe 1951 to '54 as being the creme de la creme in terms of play and artwork."
There's some interesting irony that a man who came into this hobby through a study of metallurgy prefers games known for their wooden construction, but in the intervening 50 years, Young has helped maintain countless machines of all generations. Given that, I asked him what advice he'd give anyone who's just bought their first machine, that one special game that somehow captured their imagination. I expected a suggestion about online user groups or specific tools worth investing in.
His response was a little different: "Don't turn your back on them," he said. "They multiply when you're not looking."
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