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Year You Bought Your First Pinball Machine ?

Year You Bought Your First Pinball Machine

  • Total voters
    117
First pin was an EM, can't remember which one! Bought around 1990. Went halfway with my brother, £25 each.
 
Flintstones from eBay in 2008 for £720. It was more fun than anything I own now.

The guy listed it with 3-4 year old photos and warmed it up before I picked up as it had a DMD issue when cold. Nothing changes on eBay.

The family played the **** off it. Easily 2000 plays. Absolute bargain.
 
Gottlieb Spin-A-Card (a 1969 EM) in 1987, cost £35.

An 18 year old single player EM with small flippers certainly felt a lot older than an 18 year old game (eg LOTR, Elvis) does today.

Great fun though! :)
 
FT in 2010, was about £700 from eBay, couple of months later was given TAF, couple of months after that BSD about £300-£350 from eBay. 2010 was a good pinball year for me!
 
AlanJ said:
I think i take top spot (for naivety at least):
Stern Star Trek Pro from Liberty Games £6,595 August 2017.

Swiftly followed by the £5k Paragon in Oct 2017. (£2.5k to buy, £2.5k to Fedex USA to UK in 36 hrs door to door).😂

I was really pleased with both until I joined this forum a few months later 😢

Who cares, it’s only pinball tokens.
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I nearly bought a crap LOTR from home leisure direct for £7,000. I wouldn't necessarily call it naive, pinball machines are complex I was always a bit scared of them and I thought incorrectly I wouldn't be able to troubleshoot if they went wrong, because I had heard of pinball heaven and heard about there reputation, I thought other dealers would be the same. probably similar to yourself I assumed incorrectly buying from a dealer would ensure the machine was partially restored, clean and working and help would be given for any issues and I was prepared to pay a premium for that. Having tested the waters with hld with a mame arcade cabinet, how wrong I was, but that's a different story 😏

So regarding machines, I've toyed with the idea a couple of times, I nearly bought a container of 40 from Columbia in the early 2000, don't ask! 'lol' the first one I came very, Very close to actually owning, was a lethal weapon 3 from the pinball show around 2011 for £800, clean and really nice. After a little thinking for 20 minutes and discussion with my partner at the time, we just couldn't fit it in to our small flat. I don't mean through the door 🤭

Was lucky enough to find this forum in 2020, when I had the space for one and grateful to a trusted forum member selling me a STTNG (one I actually wanted, that and LOTR which I now own) for £2,500.
 
1982
the local arcade was selling off their Gottlieb EMs
single players were $100
two player $120

Bought my first NIB (Batman) in 2008 (it is my game on IPDB.com)(also supplied pictures for a Visual Pinball recreation)
 
1998 - SWDE in good condition but not fully working. Board sent off to Phil at PH and then ok. I think it was £150 . Had that for quite a few years before selling that and buying 2 to replace.
 
£150 was going rate for sw de late 90s. I've had so many the average paid for price is still £240
 
In 2014 I was on holiday in Majorca sat outside a bar/restaurant with my family, nipped in for a wee and in the corridor outside the toilets was a pinball machine . Can't even remember which one but I honestly hadn't seen one in the wild or played one for probably 10 years or more . So I told the family I'd be a while and had a good play then spent the rest of the holiday wondering if owning a pinball was actually a 'thing' at all and even if it was, how a technically useless idiot like me could possibly own one .
About 6 months or so of research later I was lucky enough to buy my first machine from Sir Squires the modfather . A Ripleys that I should never have sold. £1750 I think. He was great as a person to show me the ropes.
Sorry for boring you all with that story but thanks to all who have helped this idiot to be able to own machines that he has no idea how they work or what to do when they don't ! You know who you are
Cheers
 
In the Mid-80s I received a Tommy Astro shooter for Xmas; that was probably the best Xmas I can remember (apart from a few years later I got a Megadrive+ Altered Beast and a JPN copy of Shadow Dancer....)

Many years later around 2005/6 I bought a Virtual Pin for I think £150as I'd moved out of a tiny studio flat in North London to a much bigger flat in Southend (rent was less, but expensive travel of course)- was terrible until I swapped everything out (pc, screen, software etc) - Had so many good times on that, especially one xmas when I was stuck in Southend and Metallica and Walking dead recreations were released for Visual Pinball; was such a buzz at the time!
At that time I had no idea that people in the u.k owned pins at home (although the guy who sold me the vpin lived out in the sticks and said he'd owned a Walking Dead) - I'd only seen John in the states from the John's arcade YT show having an NBA FB, RFM and I think a couple of others in his basement. Around that time I noticed that Stern had made a Metallica pin, but I had no idea where I'd be able to play one and I'd often drunkenly look on my phone on the long train home from nights out contemplating buying a NIB MET and paying it off over the next 10 years or something:) - owning one was so out of reach at that time.

Subsequently after discovering Flipout a few years ago and then this Forum, and moving back to London I bought my first pin from a forum member last year (at Met pro* of course! - from the home screen pic on my phone years ago to a reality)

Apologies for the rambling post; I enjoy reading other's stories re; their firs purchase!:)

*Although the Met pro is my pride and joy (along with my guitars), after 6 months of owning I am starting to feel a bit of the "only one pin syndrome", as only have space for one and am already considering at some point in the future offering it up for trade on here for a different pin, but it'd be really difficult to let go of!....
 
@Den - aka Wolfgang I also got a Tommy Astro Shooter pinball for Xmas in the mid-80s. I absolutely loved it and played the heck out of it. It still works and is now upstairs in my older son’s bedroom.

Having loved the Astro Shooter pinball, I wasn’t allowed to go to arcades as a kid, so I didn’t really pay attention to pinball until June this year (2021). My husband and I are both massive board gamers and, over the summer, we purchased a ‘roll n’ write’ game called Super-Skill Pinball 4-Cade. It was a pretty rubbish game, but I remarked to my husband that it felt a bit like playing my old Astro Shooter pinball. We had a long conversation about his memories of playing Lethal Weapon and Terminator in motorway service stations in the 90s and about how I’d always imagined having an arcade machine in my dream board gaming room and, thinking about it, that would probably be a pin.

Out of curiosity, I looked up how much it cost to buy a pinball machine. We found all the usual HLD-type adverts and decided we couldn’t really afford a pin. Like @cmrl9, I assumed a dealer would clean/repair a pin, and didn’t feel confident buying an unknown pin from eBay or a collector. However, we still downloaded the Williams pinball app and Pinball Arcade apps and kept looking up the prices of the tables we enjoyed. Eventually, I spotted an ‘unusually cheap’ (in retrospect, still overpriced) Fish Tales for sale from Williams Amusements. He told us that it was ‘cheap’ (cough) because it was missing its fish topper. After researching how I’d make a reproduction fish topper, we decided to purchase the FT with the intention that - if it didn’t work out - we could always make a repro fish topper and flip the completed pin for a HLD price (!).

The Fish Tales was filthy and had multiple problems, which the guy from Williams had no idea how to solve. As such, we were thrown immediately into debugging and fixing pins. Remarkably, I enjoyed it. The pin proved incredibly popular with both my little boys. ’Pi-Bo’ was one of my toddler’s first words and there was a household crisis everytime Fish Tales needed a repair. As such, we got really curious about other pins and, after we got our booster jabs, the first place we went was a bike trip to FlipOut. From there, we started taking bike trips with the little boys to venues with pinball machines - it worked much better for my older son (who was too young to play board games) and, unlike evening board gaming in a club, was easier to manage with limited childcare.

By September, I was looking for a second pin and bought a LoTR, as it was from a different era and had a radically different play style than Fish Tales. There also weren’t many on public display, unlike STTNG, which I also enjoy. We were already doing a massive clearout of board games, so I used the proceeds from my most recent auction to fund the LoTR purchase. This seemed a no-brainer - Fish Tales was getting a tonne more play than any of our (300!) board games. We were still having ‘household crises’ everytime a pin went out of action and I started thinking about getting a third pin, so that I could take Fish Tales out of action long-term to do a full reproduction job. I was intending to get another vintage pin, with Black Hole being my top choice but, when my older son went to Funland in Central London with me, he got absolutely obsessed with modern Sterns. So, we’ve now got a deposit down on a GZ Prem.
 
VeeMonroe said:
@Den - aka Wolfgang I also got a Tommy Astro Shooter pinball for Xmas in the mid-80s. I absolutely loved it and played the heck out of it. It still works and is now upstairs in my older son’s bedroom.

Having loved the Astro Shooter pinball, I wasn’t allowed to go to arcades as a kid, so I didn’t really pay attention to pinball until June this year (2021). My husband and I are both massive board gamers and, over the summer, we purchased a ‘roll n’ write’ game called Super-Skill Pinball 4-Cade. It was a pretty rubbish game, but I remarked to my husband that it felt a bit like playing my old Astro Shooter pinball. We had a long conversation about his memories of playing Lethal Weapon and Terminator in motorway service stations in the 90s and about how I’d always imagined having an arcade machine in my dream board gaming room and, thinking about it, that would probably be a pin.

Out of curiosity, I looked up how much it cost to buy a pinball machine. We found all the usual HLD-type adverts and decided we couldn’t really afford a pin. Like @cmrl9, I assumed a dealer would clean/repair a pin, and didn’t feel confident buying an unknown pin from eBay or a collector. However, we still downloaded the Williams pinball app and Pinball Arcade apps and kept looking up the prices of the tables we enjoyed. Eventually, I spotted an ‘unusually cheap’ (in retrospect, still overpriced) Fish Tales for sale from Williams Amusements. He told us that it was ‘cheap’ (cough) because it was missing its fish topper. After researching how I’d make a reproduction fish topper, we decided to purchase the FT with the intention that - if it didn’t work out - we could always make a repro fish topper and flip the completed pin for a HLD price (!).

The Fish Tales was filthy and had multiple problems, which the guy from Williams had no idea how to solve. As such, we were thrown immediately into debugging and fixing pins. Remarkably, I enjoyed it. The pin proved incredibly popular with both my little boys. ’Pi-Bo’ was one of my toddler’s first words and there was a household crisis everytime Fish Tales needed a repair. As such, we got really curious about other pins and, after we got our booster jabs, the first place we went was a bike trip to FlipOut. From there, we started taking bike trips with the little boys to venues with pinball machines - it worked much better for my older son (who was too young to play board games) and, unlike evening board gaming in a club, was easier to manage with limited childcare.

By September, I was looking for a second pin and bought a LoTR, as it was from a different era and had a radically different play style than Fish Tales. There also weren’t many on public display, unlike STTNG, which I also enjoy. We were already doing a massive clearout of board games, so I used the proceeds from my most recent auction to fund the LoTR purchase. This seemed a no-brainer - Fish Tales was getting a tonne more play than any of our (300!) board games. We were still having ‘household crises’ everytime a pin went out of action and I started thinking about getting a third pin, so that I could take Fish Tales out of action long-term to do a full reproduction job. I was intending to get another vintage pin, with Black Hole being my top choice but, when my older son went to Funland in Central London with me, he got absolutely obsessed with modern Sterns. So, we’ve now got a deposit down on a GZ Prem.
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Love reading these stories 😀 Saw an astro pinball on gumtree yesterday; £70 - no thanks!
 
I think about 1999, I bought Theatre of Magic for about £650. from eBay... picked it up from Bristol (about 250 mile round trip)
The TOM just about squeezed into my Ford Escort Estate !!
Sold it on a year later for about the same as I paid for it ...
1 day after seeing it I was regretting it and knew I had just made a huge mistake in selling it

I've had a few other pins on and off since then, Tales of Arabian Nights, Flintstones, and a couple of older EM's
Then in 2016 bought another TOM, maybe about £2800 ish, I really love that game !
Sold it on a couple of years later, again regretted it almost instantly !

Now I decided I need my head looking at ,.. why oh why did I sell it... I really do love that game ,,, maybe I just over played it and burned out !

So once again I am in the market for a TOM... anyone interested in selling ?!?!?!
 
2011 ish data east back to the future £500 off eBay , then followed by dataeast Simpson for about £600 then finally a stern Elvis same year for £2000. All sold within 18 month. Made £1200 profit on bttf , can’t remember what I sold Simpson for then lost about £50 on elvis was glad to nearly break even … fast forward ten year wish I’d kept them all !
 
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