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Welcome to Dave's Pinball Arcade

Dave's Pinball Arcade (2019-????)

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The arcade today. Seven pinball machines (six real, one virtual) and two arcade video games.

I'm a child of the 80s...or, more accurately, I was a teenager of the 80s. I was in high school and college when arcade video games ruled the world, and I spent a lot of time (and a lot of quarters) playing those games in every arcade, bowling alley, and convenience store I could find. 

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In the late 90s, when I discovered that people actually collected the coin-op games I grew up on, I dove in head-first. At various times, I have owned as many as 15 80s arcade games. My arcade started in a one-car garage, and grew to take up most of the basement (when we moved to a house that had one). 

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Then, in 2004, I rediscovered pinball.

 

I had been playing pinball even longer than I had been playing video games. As I remember it, I was around 7 when I played my first pinball machine. My interest in pinball waned when video games came along, but it never entirely went away. I put in quite a few hours on Centaur II at an arcade called Gadgets in Towson, Maryland. That was the game that taught me that pinball had rules and goals and wasn't just a frenzy of flipping to keep the ball in play as long as possible. But video games were my main focus. Pinball was an afterthought in the 80s.

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In the 90s, pinball had a renaissance. There were a lot of good games then--and the best of the bunch was The Addams Family. My wife and I played the heck out of it. And, in 2004--when my video game collecting obsession was at its peak--we bought an Addams as an anniversary present to ourselves. I really started getting back into pinball at that point and little did I know that it would eventually lead to a shift from "Dave's Classic Arcade" to "Dave's Pinball Arcade."

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Check out the evolution of Dave's Arcade below. And use the nav bar above to dig deeper into this ever-evolving arcade obsession of mine.

Garage-cade (2000-2008)

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The single-car garage at our house in Durham, NC was Arcade 1.0. It started out as just games in a garage--but some black paint, curtains, and creative decorating transformed it into a full-blown arcade, including a DVD player and monitor that played non-stop 80s music videos.

Basement Arcade 1.0 (2008-2014)

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When we moved from Durham, NC to Sanford, NC, Meghan (my wife) made finding a home with a basement a priority in our house search. This was specifically to accommodate my growing arcade. In this hobby, it really helps to have a supportive wife. 

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With a few additional outlets, our partially-finished basement turned out to be the perfect arcade. 

Basement Arcade 2.0 (2014-2019)

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So, a couple of things made me gravitate away from video games. First, I was finding myself spending more time repairing the games than playing them. That's fun for some collectors, but I'm not great at electronic repair so, for me, it was frustrating.

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Second, I got laid off and I needed the money more than the games. 

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At any rate, I had a huge sell-off of video games, keeping only my multicade, a MAME machine (built in my NBA Jam cabinet after the monitor died), Spy Hunter, and Food Fight. I also kept the pinball machines I had at the time. By this time, I played the pinball machines way more often than the video games.

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