@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.