Original subtitles

(mysterious music)

(energetic music)

For me, this all started

with one seemingly simple question.

I grew up in a late '80s, early '90s,

pre-internet Australia,

which is a large, isolated country

with only a handful of cities around the coast.

With a land mass comparable to that of, say,

the United States of America

but with only around 8% of the population of the US,

it's kind of a unique place to live.

So if you're into arcades and pinball

during that time here in Australia,

you're halfway around the globe

from where these big, bulky, iconic games are created.

My local arcade was in the backstreets

of a place called Christies Beach,

a small coastal town about an hour south

of one of the smallest Australian cities, Adelaide.

And this arcade was actually a bowling alley,

but that bowling alley had a Mortal Kombat II,

and that was all that mattered to me

because, well, that's my game,

the one game that secured my lifelong love of video games.

We all have one.

I recently went back to that bowling alley

after more than 25 years,

and hearing those bowling alley sounds

and smelling that bowling alley smell

but not seeing that Mortal Kombat II there,

it gave me this strange sting of nostalgic heartbreak.

And so I needed to know that one seemingly simple question,

where did that Mortal Kombat II go?

Where did all of the arcade

and pinball machines from that era go?

So I set out to find an answer

to that one seemingly simple question,

but on my way to finding that out,

I found myself going in the other direction,

all the way back to the start and wondering,

where did they come from in the first place?

(energetic music)

(truck engine rumbling)

Around about 400 kilometers away from the bowling alley

in Christies Beach, in one of the first motels

built in Australia back in the '50s

on the side of the highway

that connects Adelaide to Melbourne,

I found this place, the Australian Pinball Museum,

a truly unique place that connects the past with the present

and is home to a handful of games

that kind of started it all.

(upbeat music)

- Welcome to the pinball oasis.

It's a bit like a maze of room after room

going in all directions.

You never know what you'll find around each corner.

These along here are from the 1930s,

and that's the very start

of the commercial pinball machines.

Baffle Ball here was the first

mass-produced commercial pinball machine.

A lot of 1930s machines didn't survive World War II

because it was all the metalwork that they salvaged

and melted down to use for munitions.

Some of the mechanical technology in the games

from the '30s are just, you know, incredible.

They really pushed the boundaries

of what they could actually do

with the technology at the time,

and a lot of big innovations happened in the '30s.

Pinball has always had the plunger

that you pull back to do the skill shot.

In these early pre-flipper games,

that was the main point of the game,

knowing how far to pull it back

to make it land where you want it to.

So on these ones, the ball goes in, the flap closes it

so you can't go in that hole again,

and the score flips over at the bottom there.

You can sort of see with this

how the idea of tilting and nudging came into play.

This ball in here, that's part of the tilt mechanism.

It will sit up inside there when the game's running,

and if you nudge it and tilt it, the ball falls down,

and that will activate the tilt.

This is all the runners where the ball goes down a hole

and then runs down to the scoring area.

And also there's some movement back and forth.

That's part of the reset cycle.

(energetic music)

For many, many years, we had a few pinball machines,

a few video games for the motel guests,

just testing the waters to see is pinball and arcade

having a resurgence?

Is this actually gonna happen?

This was around, say, 2012.

The AC/DC pinball was released, and that's what got people

talking about pinball again in Australia.

It actually started to become popular,

and we thought, "Okay, well, let's go big.

Let's open something for the public.

Yeah, we'll go for a museum."

It's not just to come in here and play the games,

but we're looking at history and how pinballs are done,

education, you know, teach people the insides of a pinball,

how that all works, showcase the entire history

for people to appreciate and enjoy.

(energetic music)

Lyndon and his family set up

the Australian Pinball Museum in 2016,

and in the last couple of years,

it started to pick up in popularity,

and not just because of the rooms and rooms

full of historical pieces and memorabilia.

There's loads of new machines there, too.

But up until these past couple of years,

a couple of decades had passed with no real sign

that the pinball and arcade machines

that once dominated the '70s, '80s, and '90s

had ever existed at all.

We swapped out our Saturday nights

at the arcade with friends

for tiny boxes in our lounge rooms on our own,

and no one really seemed to care

that the golden era of gaming

was vanishing without a trace.

Well, almost no one.

(powerful music)

- I went on this forum, Aussie Arcade,

and I just said on there that I'm gonna have a night

for video games, maybe a couple of pinballs.

So I asked a couple of friends

if they could just help bring a machine

and just so I've got enough to cater for everyone.

The forum was just getting larger and larger.

We end up going around collecting pinball machines,

arcade machines, and yeah, that night come along,

and we had 80 people turn up for this event.

We had a couple people come over from Sydney.

We had a pinball competition,

IFPA approved, and it was the first

International Flipper Pinball Association competition

in South Australia, and that's when I realized

I should open up an arcade.

♪ I'll be the one to liberate you ♪

♪ From the danger cat, all the danger ♪

♪ I'll free your mind ♪

♪ Oh, as I line 'em up and shoot 'em down ♪

♪ I'll be the one to liberate you ♪

♪ Line 'em up and shoot 'em down ♪

- I want people to come here and show their kids

what they had back in the '80s and '90s.

There's nothing like elbowing the person next to you

on an arcade machine

while you're fighting dragons or bad guys.

Some of the games we used to play,

Wonder Boy, Ghost 'n Goblins, many of the platformers.

- Galaga, Pac-Man, 1942.

- Space Invaders, Galaga was obviously a massive favorite.

- Love Space Invaders, I've still got memories

of Space Invader machines just lined up side by side,

and you'd have to almost line up to get on there.

- Space Invaders, Donkey Kong, Galaga, Galaxian.

- Trackball golf games came in, and they took off like mad.

- I would play Metal Slug for hours on end,

'cause it would be two lots of 20-cent coins.

- OutRun, Terminator.

- Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, NBA Jam.

- Definitely Street Fighter and Twin Cobra.

- Frogger, Pac-Man, when that one came out.

- Snow Bros., Raiden, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

- I remember Dragon's Lair when it came out.

No idea how to play it.

Still no idea how to play it. You know, it looked great!

- Moon Patrol, Double Dragon, Golden Axe,

Shinobi, Point Blank, Daytona.

- Sega Rally, Daytona.

- Everyone knows what a Daytona driving game is,

or just about everyone does.

- Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Sunset Riders.

- One of the places that I mainly used to go to

was down at Glenelg, at Magic Mountain.

- Magic Mountain.

- Magic Mountain.

- Magic Mountain was out in The Bay.

It was a big concrete mountain which was hollowed out

with a big arcade inside.

It had the sky cycles, the bumper boats,

and pinballs and arcades.

- When I was old enough, I was doing trips

to the city, Downtown.

- Downtown.

- Downtown.

- Downtown.

Downtown, and that had a skating rink, shooting gallery.

- It had food, it had dodgem cars.

It had a shooting gallery, it had pinballs and arcades.

Effectively, it had everything.

- I remember walking in the door there

for the first time, just, "Ah, wow!"

- It seemed a big advancement from, you know,

what had been around prior,

so I think it was groundbreaking.

- Downtown was just about to officially open in Adelaide

in Hindley Street, and I just got sacked from my first job,

and I got paid $230.

That was like three or four weeks' wages at the time.

So I went to Downtown, and I blew $230 in one day.

It was like the best day ever.

And I was broke after that (laughs),

but I had a ball doing it, so.

(upbeat music)

If you lived in South Australia

during the '80s and '90s,

you've probably been to Magic Mountain or Downtown.

They were state-of-the-art, world-class leisure centers

on a scale we'd never seen here before.

In fact, when Downtown opened its doors in 1979,

it was the largest indoor leisure center of its kind

in the world, a 60,000-square-feet multi-story behemoth

whose legend lives on to this day.

But what does it take to create something so iconic

that it remains the gold standard for arcades

decades after it's gone?

(powerful music)

- My name's Frank Sebastyan, and I was the founder

of Downtown Leisure Centre in Hindley Street

and Magic Mountain, Glenelg.

(energetic music)

Everything is a good memory about Downtown pretty well.

I first entered the amusement machine industry

when I was aged 13 or so, as a school boy.

I got a weekend job at a penny arcade at Glenelg Sideshows.

My job was to have a cloth bag around the waist,

which was full of money and change

so that people could convert their money

into the right coins to play the penny arcade games.

That would've been 1957 I think.

Concurrently with that, I also got a job at the Royal Show,

which was held in September,

because a chap that I met opened a tin shed

which had about 25 penny arcade viewing machines,

which had nudie girls in them.

The business was very successful,

and it was full of men all the time

looking at these photo machines.

In those days, from 1956 or '57 to '61,

I noticed there were penny arcades around Adelaide

called pinball parlors.

There was a handful of them, from my memory,

and most of them were pretty sleazy joints

where only the rough edge of town would patronize them.

Ordinary, nice people, family groups would not go

into those places because they didn't feel comfortable.

And it always occurred to me at that stage

that wouldn't it be nice if somebody would set up a place

where family groups would be made welcome

and be happy to go into.

I tested the market for Downtown by opening a chain

of amusement centers in Adelaide

called the Family Fun Factory.

These were small centers with about 30 machines in them,

with pinball games and soccer tables and video games.

These were very successful

and showed me that something might work on a bigger scale.

We then went down to Hindley Street

and found a place called Hains Hunkin's,

which is a furniture emporium, a beautiful shop.

They were wanting to get out of it.

In 1979, in about the middle of the year,

acquired the building and started a renovation,

and by Christmas, it was complete and ready to go.

We opened the doors at that time,

just before Christmas 1979.

From day, one because of an advertising campaign

using the song of "Downtown" by Petula Clark,

that was a first as well because previously,

record companies were totally reluctant

to give anybody the rights to use their music

for commercial purposes.

But we got the song of "Downtown"

and used that as an advertising campaign,

and from day one, the whole thing was a rip-roaring success.

♪ You can feel a feeling coming in ♪

♪ Gotta make yourself a part of everything ♪

♪ Outer space, on the sea, on the ground ♪

♪ Let your mind go round ♪

♪ Downtown, Downtown ♪

- The whole ground floor was hundreds of amusement machines.

We're talking Space Invaders and other games of the day,

sit-down driving games.

I found a game called Air Hockey.

Air Hockey had never been seen in Australia,

and I went to Disneyland, and I found a big area there

which had been dedicated to about 20 Air Hockey machines.

And I said to myself, "Gee, we've gotta have some of those,"

so we did.

But the other thing that was a hot product in America

at the time was the advent of roller skating.

In fact, I brought over an American skating manager

from San Jose, and he was not only a skating manager,

but he was an expert disco skater.

He held classes to instruct locals in Adelaide

how to roller skate to the disco music.

So the skating rink was such a key part of Downtown.

A big attraction on the ground floor

was in the back left-hand corner a huge shooting gallery.

There was never one of these in Adelaide before like it

and probably not in Australia at the time.

A fellow played a honky-tonk piano, and you could shoot him.

These guns used were like rifles, like a .303.

It was an electronic one, so it was perfectly safe.

There were no bullets or slugs,

nothing to hurt anybody with.

Above the ground floor was a mezzanine,

and the mezzanine had about 60 pinball games,

and we had 30 dodgem cars.

It was a fantastic attraction.

Everybody loved driving dodgem cars.

We had old-fashioned sideshows

where you could do knock them downs

and other such things as well.

Adjacent to the sideshows was a mini golf course.

There were 60,000 square feet, it was a huge center.

There was nothing like it in the world, in fact.

There were plenty of outdoor centers

like Magic Mountain in Los Angeles

and Disneyland and Knott's Berry Farm,

but there was no indoor center like Downtown,

and we set out to make Downtown Leisure Centre

the biggest and best of its type in the world,

and I think we succeeded in doing that.

60,000 square feet is about the size

of a football field, and filling an area up like that

with video games isn't easy,

particularly when most of them

are built halfway across the world.

But with the arcade scene booming,

arcade owners would soon need

to find a more cost-effective way

to host the ever-growing catalog

of the latest and greatest games here in Australia.

- In Australia, we don't have a lot of dedicated cabinets.

In America, they still have the manufacturers

produce the cabinets,

and they sell them as the dedicated cabinets.

Originally, they'd import them all in.

They're all sold as original cabinets.

If you wanted to buy a Pac-Man,

you had to buy a Pac-Man cabinet

and then a Donkey Kong cabinet

and then Space Invaders cabinet.

Until they had a trade conference,

they were showing off this latest tabletop game.

They all went for lunch and the techs got in there,

pulled the board out, put different game board in there,

changed the controls, and then after lunch they said,

"Oh, we've got this new other game here

we're going to demonstrate to you."

And some of the operators looked at it,

"Well, that's the same cabinet you had this morning.

How come it's got a different game in it?"

And they then said,

"Well, if you can change it in an hour,

change the game over and get it all working in an hour,

why can't we just buy the game board

and bring our old cabinets in and get them done?"

That started happening more and more.

- This is built by Leisure Allied Industries.

They just put a different control panel on,

wider or shorter depending on the type of game.

- Leisure & Allied Industries' cabinets

are very generic apart from the artwork.

They'd make a whole run of games that had,

you know, different artwork,

but it was exactly the same cabinet.

- LAI also built some pinball machines as well.

When Stern was around, the first iteration of Stern

in the late '70s, early '80s,

LAI would bring in containers

with all the parts for the pinballs,

so the playfields, the back glass, the boards,

and actually build the cabinets here in Australia.

- This is typical of the type of cabinet

that we grew up with.

There was the lowboys and these that were mass produced

with the different game boards in them,

and it's what we got.

- These Natmar holding cabinets were like LAI,

like Viper, like Gottlieb cabinets.

They were the backbone of Australian arcade cabinets.

You'd see them in the fish and chip shops.

You'd buy a kit with a marquee and the game board,

and you'd be able to, as an operator,

change your game over to something new.

- Which is good for the operator.

That they can put 20 or 30 different games in

over a four- or five-year period.

- With Downtown set up and thriving

in the heart of Adelaide city,

Frank set his sights on a second large-scale venue,

but this time in a location that would capitalize

on the hot South Australian summers.

- In my mind, there was only ever one, and that was Glenelg.

It had to be Glenelg beach.

The idea was that we might find a spot down there,

and we did.

We ended up with a 49-year lease, in fact,

a spot where there used to be the old merry-go-round

and the penny arcade, in fact, that I worked in as a boy.

But the condition of building by the council,

they wouldn't allow us to build an ordinary,

modern, nice-looking building.

They wanted a building that looked like a natural rock.

We went down with our architect and creative people,

and we took photographs of the rock face of Maslins Beach,

and that's what the skin of Magic Mountain was modeled on.

By imposing that condition on us,

it added another $2 million to the cost of the development.

It cost well over $6 million in total

to build Magic Mountain, but 2 million unnecessarily.

The problem with it was eventually, or very quickly,

was that the public, some public members

didn't like the look of it.

They said it looked like a lump of dog's turd,

which in their view, perhaps it did.

But nevertheless, we got the blame for that.

The developers got the blame all along.

If you listen to the talkback shows on the radio,

they all blame Magic Mountain

for the god's rot, or for the dog crap.

But it was the council that made us do that,

yet they got out of it scot-free.

The first floor had two levels.

At one point was the sky cycle.

My colleague John McDonald, he and I went to Japan

to look for new items.

That had only just been invented over there,

and there was one of them running

in an amusement show that we went to.

So we copied the thing, got the rights to it,

and we built it here in Adelaide.

I don't know of any other one in the world

that's been built apart from the original one

and the one we had at the Mountain.

It would've been about 20 feet from the ground,

so it was a long way down.

You couldn't just hop off if it jammed.

You had to wait for somebody to rescue you.

There were four entrances to Magic Mountain.

The main one from the car park straight in front of you

was the huge old carousel.

We bought it from the original operator

and restored it because it was a little bit run down

but not too bad, which was at the time nearly 100 years old

when we installed it there.

The rest of the main ground floor

was taken up with video games and pinball machines

until you got to the entrance to the golf course.

That was the second entrance coming into Magic Mountain.

And then adjacent to that was the bumper boats.

The third level up the top was where the dodgem cars were.

We had about 20 dodgem cars up there,

but the hot one of course was, guess what?

The water slide. The water slide was just fantastic.

It had just started as a concept

in outdoor recreation parks.

We had four flumes.

When we first opened it, we noticed that the flume

nearest the beach had a sharp bend

just before it entered into the water,

and we thought, "Strewth, this could be dangerous.

They might fly out."

So we quickly closed that flume down

and straightened the bend out

so that it took the danger out.

The lines to get on the water slide at the time,

a bit like Downtown, you know,

they were hundreds of meters long waiting to get on.

It was fantastic.

Eventually, the business started to wane a bit,

and it dropped.

After about five years or so,

we had to close the original Downtown,

and Magic Mountain kept going for a number of years

until eventually it closed down and was demolished as well.

I went down at the time it was being demolished,

and I have a sample of the rock.

This is the original, well, part of the original,

rock face of Magic Mountain.

That's a memory for me to keep, that's all.

I only wanted a little piece

so I could put it in this display.

And yeah, that's my souvenir of Magic Mountain.

(calm music)

The tail end of the '90s were rough

on arcades and leisure centers.

The world of entertainment was evolving fast,

and those big, heavy, coin-guzzling arcade

and pinball machines were doing a lot less coin-guzzling

and suddenly taking up a whole lot of unnecessary space.

- One of my favorite childhood places, Magic Mountain,

I basically was told towards the end of my high school years

that it was gonna close down.

And I was like, "Oh, wow, how can a place like this

that brings so much fun close down?"

- Growing up with them all, I guess you take it for granted.

You think, "Oh, yeah, that's always been there"

and don't think much of it.

- Home consoles got affordable.

The games were great, and a lot of the arcade games

were on the consoles at home,

so you didn't have to pay per game.

You just bought the cartridge, stuck it in,

and the whole family was playing.

- That was sort of the end of a lot of arcades.

- They just all shut down.

- If you're an operator in the '90s, it's about dollars.

Arcades take a big footprint,

so there's a big overhead to power your machines,

to pay your staff, keep the lights on.

- The pokie machines came in,

and that hurt the industry a lot.

- So all the pubs, they said,

"Oh, we don't want your pinball machines

or arcade games here.

We're putting pokies in."

So they're calling us up saying, "Take all your games out.

Take all your games out."

- Nearly every pinball manufacturer shut down.

Even Williams, the world's largest,

90% of their income was coming from pokie machines,

so they just closed their doors.

- Prize redemption was taking off.

Like, the skill testers and people wanna be able

to put their dollar in and win something back.

- The GST coming in in 2001

was probably the nail in the coffin for the industry.

A 10% hit on all your turnover,

and you couldn't get people to put a dollar 10

into an arcade cabinet.

I think it would've been such a tough time

for all the operators.

- All of a sudden, all the venues

that I used to travel to were not existing.

I mean, obviously it became easier for everybody,

but at the same time, it ruined it a lot

for these fantastic coin-op machines.

- If you were a collector at that time,

you could get a lot of machines for a good price.

But yeah, a lot of the machines

I think are now lost for good, yeah.

Some of them did end up in landfill.

(calm music)

(birds tweeting)

- Back in 1979, this is how a game

would've went to an arcade,

but this one just never got to an arcade,

so it's never been opened.

The first pinball machine I ever actually put money in

was a Buckaroo.

One day many years ago, I just thought to myself,

"I'd love to have a Buckaroo pinball machine."

I thought I'd be able to make a phone call,

you know, and there'd be 10 of them like available.

Person that I spoke to, he just said,

"That kind of stuff's not around anymore, mate.

You won't find anything like that."

This is the one that started at all.

This is the first pinball machine

I ever played in my life as a kid,

and there's different variations of Buckaroo.

There's Cowpoke, Rancho, and there's another one

called Flipper Cowboy, which I haven't got yet,

but I should be able to get eventually.

My plan never was to collect pinballs and arcade games.

I just wanted a Buckaroo, but found all these other ones,

and I just got so much enjoyment out of it

and that I just kept collecting.

It's very good to have, to be focused on something

and something that you love and you enjoy

and other people can experience,

and I get all three of them things

out of these pinball machines and arcade games.

This game come out about 1979, 43 years old,

brand new in the box, never been outta the box.

Basically I bought this machine

probably 20 years ago from Canada.

It seemed like a hoax, 'cause it was too good to be true.

It was called Time Travel Warehouse.

This game was there along with lots and lots

of other brand-new old-stock games,

and I had the chance to buy this,

and 'cause this was a game I used to play

when I was a kid at Downtown.

So I wanted to buy one of these for years,

but they're a pretty rare game,

and then I had the chance to buy a brand-new one.

But I've had it for all this time,

and I thought, "What am I gonna do with it?"

Because once I open it, it's not brand new anymore,

but this is like the perfect opportunity

to share it with everybody.

So today we're gonna open it for the very first time.

(packaging crackling)

So I'm imagining I'm a operator from 1979,

just opening up my latest delivery to put in the arcade.

Well, there's a brand-new game in there.

It looks like there was a key sitting on top,

underneath a piece of sticky tape

that's on top of the machine.

That's probably a key to open the machine

to get inside of it.

So I'm hoping that it's fallen down inside the guts.

(bright digital music)

Wow! (upbeat music)

Wow.

That's a brand-new game.

That is amazing. That is amazing.

That's a brand-new game.

This is a brand-new game, so cool. (laughs)

Well, what's this? This might be the key.

Wow.

Wow, that is brand new.

There's books with it as well.

Wow.

It actually looks super clean.

I was a bit worried that there might be rodents in there

that have got in there, but they obviously haven't.

So it looks kind of perfect.

Real hard game, real basic game.

It's got cows in it on the side of the road,

and you hit the cows, and they're just made of sticks,

and they just all explode.

But it's a really hard game

because the steering was so wonky on it.

Hopefully it's gonna work.

- At last count, Jeff's personal collection

of arcades and pinballs

was somewhere between 300 and 400 machines,

a truly impressive collection.

But what's equally as impressive

is that Jeff has a unique memory

and story for each and every one of them.

My all-time favorite video game to play is Asteroids Deluxe.

There was only ever one of them around,

like, a full-size upright one, and that was at Downtown.

So I used to specifically go to Downtown

to play Asteroids Deluxe.

Then many years later,

I was looking to buy an Asteroids Deluxe.

Never thought I'd find one, and one day just outta the blue,

my brother-in-law, he come around,

and I was telling him this story about this Asteroids Deluxe

being my favorite game, blah blah blah.

And he says, "Why don't you go to Charcoal Chicken?

They've got one in there in the front of their shop."

And I said, "No, they haven't."

And he says, "Go and have a look."

And so I actually jumped in my car

and went to this Charcoal Chicken, and it was there,

and it was right there, and it had been there for years,

10 minutes from where I live, never knew it was there.

And even saying this bring chills down my spine,

like, because it was so magical that day

when I said to the guy, "Do you wanna sell it?"

So he plugged it in, plugged it in right in front of me,

and then half the screen was missing.

And he said, "It's never done that, it's always worked."

"You just plug it in, it works," and he says,

"Well, I'm not gonna spend any money fixing it."

He says, "Well, you've come on the right day."

He says, "Oh, you can have it for like $200"

or whatever it was.

This is the game that I played when I was a kid.

This is the actual game that I used to play at Downtown.

So going from telling my brother-in-law the story,

like, within an hour I owned, ended up owning

the original Asteroids Deluxe

that I played as a kid at Downtown.

Unbelievable, unbelievable.

This is two variations, like the electromechanical version

and the digital version of Close Encounters.

And this one is a sample game as well,

which means it's a prototype, one of the first ones.

I've wanted one of these for years and years.

Yeah, I love it. This is Cirqus Voltaire.

This is the actual one from Magic Mountain.

FunHouse, this is just a cool game.

Everyone loves FunHouse. It's got Rudy the talking head.

Orbitor 1, the playfield is like the moon,

surface of the moon.

It's all over the joint, so the ball hit,

comes off the bumpers and spins around,

then it goes round behind the flippers.

Lots of pinball guys that have been here,

and they just say they hate it,

and I just laugh, 'cause I love it.

Q♪Bert's Quest, this is like a freaky game,

flippers are all backwards and everything,

and it's based on the Q♪Bert arcade machine.

Lots of people always wanna buy that from me,

but I don't wanna sell them.

720, such a cool game.

This was a very cool game back in the day.

It's like similar to Asteroids,

but the only way you can play it is two players.

Stunt Cycle, which is like a Evel Knievel game.

I used to play this when it was new.

Got that from Melbourne.

That was like 50 bucks or something as well

'cause just people didn't want them.

Discs of Tron, it's a walk-in cabinet.

So I had two of these, but I got rid of one years ago.

This is the Aladdin's Castle one.

This is like an absolutely amazing game, hologram game.

So I could see back in when it was new

how you would think it was an actual hologram,

but it's basically a laser disc and a couple of mirrors.

(arcade machine thunks)

- [Cowboy] It's mighty quiet around here.

- This is Dirty Harry. I bought this off my friend Mark.

He told me the story about it when I bought it.

- I think the most challenging repair I've ever had

was a pinball machine had come off the back of a trailer,

and they're doing 110 Ks down the road,

shattered the cabinet and everything to pieces,

and I mean in pieces.

Anything on the circuit boards that was higher than that

had been ripped off the circuit boards,

heat sinks and amplifiers and that,

and some of the ICs were cracked in two and.

- That didn't kind of put me off.

That excited me, like the fact that it's still alive,

(laughs) basically because I think he said

it fell off upside down,

and it landed on its headboard on the back

and just slid down the road, and I thought,

"That's a cool story. I've gotta buy this."

- Took me several years to get it up back together.

- So this is that actual one.

This is called the Mouth of Truth,

and this was at Magic Mountain just before they shut down.

It's a fortune teller.

Put your hand in its mouth, and it spits out a,

reads a fortune teller and gives it to you.

In the '90s, there was a big auction,

big advert in the paper,

and it said something like 40 machines.

It was all the stuff from Downtown.

And I walked into the big auction room,

and there was video games

and me and the auctioneer, and that was it.

There was nobody else.

And I said, "Look, mate, there's nobody here.

How much are they?"

And he goes, "Oh, $10 each."

So I ended up buying four machines,

because you've gotta remember at the time,

nobody wanted them,

so that's why there was no one else at the auction.

One of the machines that I got for $10

was a game called Fisco 400,

which is a four-player driving game.

That thing actually worked, for $10.

Got it home, and it actually worked.

This is the other one I got for 10 bucks,

but this one doesn't actually work,

and it's a video pinball.

It's got basically got a playfield that's upside down

on the top of the machine

with flippers and bumpers and the ball and everything.

The rest all ended up going to a salvage yard.

Then eventually nobody wanted to buy them from there,

so they got put out in the weather under tarps.

The tarps deteriorated, and the rest is history.

Basically they all kind of went back to the earth.

- [Danny] Hello.

- [Bianca] Hello. How are you?

- [Danny] Good.

I was saying about how you've always been with GameRoom.

GameRoom's been there your whole life

since you were a baby.

- [Bianca] Oh, yeah.

- [Danny] And how you started working at GameRoom

as a security guard. - Security, yep.

(both laughing)

With my little security hat,

going around, "Do you have a stamp?

No? Well, then you have to go to the front counter."

- Tonight is Pinball Club at GameRoom Essentials,

a weekly social semi-competitive pinball event,

kind of like playing social basketball

or indoor cricket, but it's pinball.

So it's all hands on deck for the Daly family.

Danny, Danny's wife, Michelle, and their daughters,

Kim and Bianca, knock off work for the day

from their day jobs and head straight to GameRoom

to host the event.

And they do this most days, including weekends.

For the Dalys, this is day-to-day life with an arcade

and has been for the past 17 years or so.

- Family is a large part of GameRoom Essentials,

and my kids are brought up with it.

We don't have weekends.

We never have weekends away 'cause we're always here.

Any money that the arcade makes goes back into the arcade.

There's not enough money in this to actually pay wages yet.

Would love to one day, that was the aim,

and every year I was saying, "This is the year"

I'm gonna pay myself a wage,

or "No, maybe next year I'm gonna pay myself a wage."

But it hasn't happened yet, but it will happen.

We're not actually running a tournament tonight.

It's just a flip frenzy, which is more laid back.

It's still competition, but it's not for big points

or anything like that.

It's just a heap of friends getting together, bit of banter.

(jack clicking)

And it's very easy.

It's just look at the screen.

It'll tell you which machine you're on,

who you're playing against,

and then you quickly have your game.

Whoever wins goes onto the computer,

puts down who wins the game,

and then it generates the next game ready to go.

I've been collecting a lot of this stuff for many years.

It's like those things, you never wanna throw it away

'cause you don't know when you're gonna need it.

And especially with arcades, if you throw something away,

you might be not be able to get that thing again.

It's just like these from Blockbuster

when we were there for the latest-release movies.

"Robocop," got that when I got the Robocop pinball machine.

And you see CRTs all around the place,

'cause there's a lot of things need the CRT screens,

a lot of light-gun games.

A lot of the older consoles will not work

on the LCD screens nowadays.

There's buttons and cables and joysticks and circuit boards

and absolutely anything and everything,

but it's all stuff that's come along, could be free,

something that's not working,

and think I might be able to use a part off that one day.

One day I'll have to sort through,

get some proper shelving and lay things out.

It all just takes time, and just don't get enough time

to do anything anymore.

- If you wanna have an arcade full of machines,

the amount of spare parts you need lying around

that you can't necessarily get,

changeover machines so when one dies,

you can put another one in its spot.

Especially here, there's just no parts around.

The machines aren't around,

and you've gotta really know the hoarders and collectors

to be able to get access to that stuff.

(energetic rock music)

I had a customer contact me and say,

"Hey, man, I got a machine stashed away in the shed."

I end up throwing it in the van and bringing it home

because you don't generally get bargains all the time,

so when one pops up, you grab it.

Street Fighter II: Championship Edition,

it's one of those games everybody's fond of.

It's a good, clean, original cabinet,

and when I say original, it's got all the same monitor,

the same wiring, all the stuff in it

that it came out with, and there may be a time

where it could've been something else,

but the game board, the marquee, all the bits

line up pretty well with it being consistent

with being a Street Fighter machine, at least for a while.

So to have one of these in the collection

I think is very nostalgic and a worthwhile piece to have.

Big standout parts, the faded marquee.

We'll get a new one of these printed up.

We'll redo all the aluminium work,

clean up all the control panels.

MCA joysticks, in Australia, these were the duck's guts.

They were a locally made, Australian-made product,

and they have a specific feel that no other units have,

so they will be rebuilt.

They might be a little bit chipped on the top,

but we'll pull them apart, we'll rebuild them.

We'll clean them up because you go replace them

with something else, and it's just not the same.

(energetic rock music)

All right, the moment of truth.

(machine whirring)

That sounds good.

(lively rock music)

Well, we can see the screen needs a bit of adjustment,

and it's got some color out, but we've got an image,

and the game board's working,

and it all seems to be firing up and running.

Listen to that music, that's awesome.

- [Game] Round one, fight!

- Now, somewhere along the line,

the coin mech's been pulled off,

which we'll have to look into.

And these are the kind of things people hold onto.

Coin mechs like this, you know,

can't just go to the shop and buy them.

So we'll either repair it or start ringing around

and find someone that'll have one

and start the treasure hunt, but I actually think

that'll be reasonably saveable by the looks of it.

A lot of them, when you get them from homes like this,

they're set on a free play.

Yep, this one's set on free play.

(lively music)

Well, apart from the fact it's hard to see,

it all works and runs really well, and the sound's great.

If I wanna restore an original Ninja Turtles,

Street Fighter, Simpsons cabinet,

it costs money not only to get it to Australia

but then shipped several thousand Ks

across Australia in a truck to be dropped off,

and things get damaged, stuff happens.

You pull it out of the packaging or the wrap,

you realize it's got damage, something's not right.

So by the time you've landed the machine and got it here,

you're almost up to the market value of it.

And then you gotta start pulling parts out

and sending things here and there

and spending a lot of time yourself

checking buttons, switches, wiring looms.

The hours involved can be weeks sometimes.

You know, people go, "Oh, they're not worth much."

Well, if I want that machine,

I'm gonna have to spend that much to get it running again.

- I think the number-one thing people don't realize

about pinball machines is they compare it

to just about every other piece of equipment

they deal with in common life,

and they presume it's replaceable, it's fixable.

You just swap in the part, and you swap out another one.

They don't realize how many moving parts,

how many unique parts bespoke to that particular game

that they're standing in front of there are

and how few of them there are left on the Earth

and how far you have to go to get them.

You know, if a part breaks on Flight 2000 behind me,

who knows where you go for that plastic part?

They haven't been printed for 30 years.

And that's what they don't realize,

I think, of the general public,

and I don't really want them to realize that.

I just want them to come in and have fun.

I'm not here to labor them with my problems.

I just think that that's the one thing they don't realize,

and sometimes when you see people slapping the games around

a bit more than they should or just flipping like crazy

when the ball's nowhere near the flippers,

that's probably the one thing that sends me nuts,

just flip, flip, flip, flip, flip, flip, flip,

and the ball's not even, you know, out of the shooter lane,

because rebuilding flippers

is not the funnest job in the world.

(energetic music)

- I remember vividly traveling to Disney with my parents,

and we were staying at this awesome hotel, awesome pool,

but I found that they had a games room

with the Simpsons machine there,

and I spent most of my time in the arcade room

as opposed to in the swimming pool

and all the other cool stuff

that you should've been doing as a kid.

Just spent countless tokens and quarters,

American quarters on this Simpsons machine.

After a while, it was my life goal

to get my own Simpsons machine.

Years later, I went to my now business partner,

Nathan, into his house, and he took me to his shed,

and he had pinball machines and arcades there,

and I never thought you could buy your own.

It was one of those things,

that arcades are for you to go to this place

and pump quarters into it, pump dollars into it,

play, and go home,

and if you wanna play games at home,

video games or computers.

Nathan basically introduced me to a few people

where I could buy and trade arcades and pinballs with,

and then I caught the bug, and once I found out

that I could chase my dream of owning a Simpsons,

my own American-cabinet Simpsons machine,

it took me a while, but I found one.

When I got it, it was waterlogged at the bottom.

Pieces were falling apart in transport.

The game worked, but the monitor was dull.

Decals on the side were gone.

The marquee was gone as well, control panel was gone.

So it was basically either a parts machine

for the game board or a massive restoration,

and I managed to find Simon at Arcade Garage.

He said he would take that job on,

and he literally stripped the decals off the side,

stripped the control panel with decals,

and then proceeded to rebuild the cabinet

and strengthen the cabinet where it was all waterlogged,

cut those pieces out, bogged the cabinet

and sand it back so it was a nice surface,

re-sprayed it, then applied the new decals,

powder-coated everything that's metal on the machine,

rebuild the monitor chassis, new marquee,

new control panels.

So basically every piece of the machine's been rebuilt,

and yeah, it's my favorite by far.

(bright music)

- On the back of the neck, the little circuit board

on the back had a whole heap of old dry solder joints.

So we got the soldering iron out and everything,

and reflowed a whole heap of the solder joints on the back.

When we fired it back up, we had a whole heap of color

back in the screen, so the dry solder joints

were stopping signals from getting through,

which was a really good outcome

considering I was concerned that we had a dead monitor.

The original buttons that were in it,

a lot of them are stuck.

Now, we can clean them up and rebuild them,

but I tend to go for replacing with a newer one

just for that nice, new look.

The original joysticks that were in it,

these are the old MCA Australia joysticks.

They are absolute gold.

So they've been pulled apart, rebuilt, cleaned,

tested, and all ready to go back in.

Wiring looms, all labeled ready to go.

These bits have been cleaned up.

They had a lot of rust on them.

Give them a light sand down,

and get them ready to polish up.

They go on the top and bottom of the marquee.

The marquee we're gonna replace.

We've got a brand-new one coming to suit

or a new replica coming to suit the game.

And then we're gonna have to look at this,

'cause as much as it's what came with the machine,

I don't think it's right for a Street Fighter machine.

Someone's taken the original three holes

and added three more to play six-button games.

So originally it would've been a Metal Slug or a Pang

or something else like that with three buttons.

So I'm thinking fill the holes, weld the holes up,

re-skin it with the new stickers

to suit the Street Fighter, then re-drill it,

reset it, and have it so that the marquee,

the screen, and the control panel all flow through

and matches a Street Fighter unit.

Just a good spit polish and a few stickers and done.

(calm music)

- When you see what goes into restoring

one single old game, it becomes a lot easier to understand

why there's not that many around anymore.

The specialized parts, the know-how, the time,

you have to really love that one single game.

So imagine doing all that but on a larger scale

with, say, 200 games.

(light-hearted music)

- I had a dream, a vision, if you will,

to bring alive a retro arcade.

I wanted to do it in a scale that was, I guess,

impactful, meaningful, and this is a result of that.

We're five, 5 1/2 years in.

There's games like Shinobi, Golden Axe,

of course the Street Fighter series,

all the spinoffs from that with Mortal Kombat,

King of the Fighters, and then your classics

that you can't look past, Moon Patrol, Donkey Kong, Galaga,

all the games that you remembered playing growing up,

all the games that you can't find anywhere to play.

Put them all under one roof, unlimited free play, go hard.

(energetic music)

(energetic music continues)

Inside each arcade cabinet is the arcade board.

So we have some on display downstairs in our display cabinet

'cause we like to share what was going on

on the inside of the cabinets with people.

And running an arcade, we have games.

We have to choose what games go into the cabinets,

what hits the floor,

and we have quite a collection of game boards.

We've had these custom-made boxes

for storing them to give them protection,

both from electric static

and also physical protection against crushes.

We have Neo Geo cartridges here.

These are some of our smaller boards,

and then these are the larger boards

that usually take a larger box.

There's several hundred here with all sorts of games

that we're looking forward to adding to the arcade

at some point in the future.

- Behind the scenes at 1UP Arcade Australia

is almost as impressive as the arcade itself.

There's hundreds of game boards, spare parts,

controllers, monitors, and games

that are going in and out of rotation all the time,

because with machines this old,

each day Stephen fires up the arcade,

there's always a chance that one or two games

just might not boot up that day.

There's an element of luck involved in running an arcade,

and 2,000 kilometers away in Adelaide,

Danny and GameRoom Essentials

are dealing with some particularly bad luck.

(feet sloshing)

- [Danny] The laptop's all under the water.

- [Michelle] Yep.

- [Danny] The whole desk, microphone, oh, the launch pad.

- Heavy storms aren't common in Adelaide,

so when they do hit, a lot of the older buildings

aren't able to withstand the winds, rain, and hail.

And unfortunately for Danny,

GameRoom Essentials' current location

is in one of those older buildings

right where the storm hit.

- Oh, shit, oh.

(somber music)

(vacuum chugging)

(fans whirring)

So one of the first places I checked was my arcades.

When the storm hit, I was just worried

about the things I could not replace,

and these four cabinets here, Ninja Turtles,

Mortal Kombat II, Rampage, NBA Jam,

they're all staples for an arcade,

and if I lost these to the storm,

I don't know where I could replace these.

So the retro consoles were always

one of the most popular for adults and kids,

adults reliving their memories,

and the kids seeing these hobby games for the first time.

The whole desk was just underwater.

It won't be the same without these consoles.

We really need to get these up and running again.

There's so many times that I've just closed the door

and said, "That's it.

I just wanna sell off everything

and just call it a day."

- When your back's against the wall

and when you feel like giving up,

it is an internal struggle

when there's no one really to turn to

who can sympathize or understand, you know,

what you're up against and what you're doing.

- It's just been hurdle after hurdle.

Everyone's saying, "Yeah, just push through it,

"push through it," but they don't know how hard it is,

how much it's costing.

We've taken so much money out of our house loan

just to keep this business running,

and when we're finally starting to see some profit,

something else happens.

But everyone goes, "Oh, it's a great thing"

"for the community," but it's hurting us.

- You know, if you're gonna take the leap

into opening a business, you're gonna spend

a lot of long nights and weekends working

and trying to get those little improvements.

And having a young family, it can take,

it takes its toll on the family emotionally

because Dad's always, you know, fixing a pinball machine

on the weekend or after hours, or, you know.

- My contribution as a father and a family man

was pretty limited, really,

something that I've felt guilty about ever since, actually.

I've never been comfortable with what I did.

But sacrifices were made, and I certainly did that,

and I deprived our family of a normal sort of relationship

as much as I could've.

I didn't do as best as I could.

- Opening 1UP Arcade has been

the hardest thing I've done in my life.

I'd probably go as far to say

in some ways it's been too hard.

- Sure, having an arcade is everyone's dream.

So many people have the dream of opening a arcade,

but it's not always great.

- There's no reason to do this

from a business perspective, really.

There are a lot of smarter things

you could do with your money than this.

So you've gotta make sure you wanna be there every day.

And there was some times, a couple of times

where I thought, "Maybe this is just gonna be too hard."

There is too much at risk.

"There are too many sleepless nights."

- The arcade is, you know, is unique. It is really special.

And maybe for most people who walk through those doors,

they won't know how special, how unique it is.

But yeah, maybe it's those few, that one in a hundred

that do come through the doors,

and they really appreciate what this is.

Yeah, maybe that makes it all worthwhile.

- With attendance at GameRoom Essentials

at an all-time low after the COVID lockdowns,

Danny was forced to shut his doors yet again

to repair damages done during the storm

and to take stock of what games had survived.

- Sorry I can't turn on the lights on,

'cause we've got no electricity in here still.

Everything just shorted out.

It was just mud and water right through here to the back.

The majority of the machines in here are pinball machines.

Luckily they're off the ground.

We've got stock from skill testers here,

and these boxes all just got waterlogged.

We haven't even delved further in

to see what other damages there were.

So the water went right from the front door,

right through to the workshop, right to the back wall.

We've got a small room in here with storage,

and the water just rolled through

and flooded this whole area.

(solemn music)

- Danny made the decision to push forward

and reopen GameRoom a few weeks after the storm.

But the once vibrant and thriving arcade

Danny and his family had proudly shared with the public

for more than 15 years was now hanging on by a thread,

and as attendance continued to get worse,

so, too, did Danny's luck.

- The rent is just building up.

We're paying extra each month to catch up

from what we couldn't pay

when we were closed down with COVID.

A little nervous, we don't know what's gonna happen.

Just have to play it by ear, see what they have to offer,

see what we've got to offer,

and hopefully we can work something out.

What I proposed to them was to lose our back sheds

and terminate the lease.

So we're still running. Our main hall, we've still got that.

We've still got our full capacity inside.

We might have to move a lot of the stuff

that we've got in the shed, all our spare parts inside.

They could've said, "Okay, that's it.

You gotta close by this date or you gotta close now."

That's totally in their rights to do that.

Like I said, it could've been a lot worse.

(calm music)

- But things did get worse.

As attendance continued to dwindle, hope was finally lost,

and after 16 long years, GameRoom Essentials was closed.

(calm music)

- It wasn't easy for him to decide to close

'cause he's been so passionate

and it feels like every time he gets there,

there's a knockdown.

Like, the kids have taken it this hard as well, though.

But no, we never thought, we knew, you know,

it would maybe one day, but not so soon

and not the way it's happened.

And yeah, it's just, yeah,

hard to put it into words what it feels like.

(calm music)

(door clanging)

- This is where we have some of the cabinets

that are in storage about to go into locations,

and we work on them a little bit here as well.

Pinball is something that was born

out of a funny event at home

where I had four pinball machines

in my living room in my private collection.

One of them just so happened to have

a different shooter rod on it,

and unfortunately my son bumped his head into it,

and my wife said that I needed to get rid of them.

Now, technically speaking, she didn't tell me to sell them.

So I decided to start a pinball business

with a good friend of mine, Nathan.

I'd, you know, built up

a good six to eight years of collecting,

and I got to the stage where I was over 70 machines.

- They offer a number of different services,

in-home rental, on site,

but now are moving into pinball repair service,

parts supply, and looking at ways

to further promote pinball in Adelaide

and run a number of comps locally

to encourage newcomers to the sport.

Sport, community, sorry,

to encourage newcomers to the community.

- GameRoom Essential left behind a pretty big hole

in the arcade and pinball community in Adelaide,

but its existence has paved the way for those that follow.

And for those now carrying the torch,

Danny is amongst their biggest supporters.

- It's really good to see them

come along into the community.

They're reaching into areas that a lot of people haven't

and opening up to new audiences

that wouldn't seen pinball before.

Definitely on the rise, it's on the comeback.

This is the biggest surge since mid '90s.

- All things considered,

the future of arcade and pinball in Australia looks bright.

(triumphant music)

- Only 5,000 people on Earth get to have one.

There's probably not even that many of them left.

There wouldn't be.

There's probably only, you know,

a couple of thousand of them left now, I'd say.

So the fact that we've got one here

and you know, I'm lucky enough to own one

is something I'm very grateful for.

(dramatic music)

(flippers clicking)

- [Game Voice] We are not amused!

You better stop!

- My personal journey into arcade operation

began with a personal acquisition.

I bought a pinball machine for home,

and it was even better than I ever imagined

owning a pinball machine would be,

and I just couldn't believe it.

It was like so much fun, and family were enjoying it so much

that I just had to get another one. (laughs)

And that's very common.

That situation is very common like amongst homeowners.

Then I had two pinball machines,

and I just had to have that Addams Family

because that was the one I'd always wanted, really.

But it was already unaffordable.

It was already a lot of money to buy an Addams Family,

and this was years ago.

So I made a little deal with myself

that if I got an Addams Family,

I'd put it out on location for people to enjoy,

and I'd recoup some of the outlay back.

And I was nervous as hell to put this thing out.

I remember the day I delivered it to the location.

It was raining, and I didn't have the equipment

to deliver it.

It was in an open-back trailer,

and when I got it there, it didn't work.

(energetic music)

- (beep) Sunshine Coast Pinball is a unique place

where the past, present, and the future all intersect.

Vaughan loves his classics,

but he's also introducing new games to new players,

both casually and competitively.

- I was in the media before I did this,

and this was somewhat foreign to me, and it was a risk.

It was a big risk with nearly everything I owned

on the line, and there were a lot of people around me

who were saying, "Perhaps you should choose something

a little bit more secure.

Perhaps you should do something a little bit more sensible."

Had I had known what I know now,

I would definitely have done it earlier,

'cause the only thing that stopped me

from doing this earlier was the fear of it not working.

And now that I've overcome that fear,

that I know that it's not actually all about it working.

It's gotta work a little bit,

but it doesn't need to be a massive

runaway financial success, it's already working.

I don't have to worry about that anymore.

I just need to get on with it and do the thing

that makes me and everybody around me feel good.

We're in another golden period right now.

The best games ever made are being made right now.

(upbeat music)

- Welcome to Haggis Pinball.

We are the only pinball manufacturer in Australia,

the only one for about 40-odd years.

We probably manufacture close to 90%

of a pinball machine all in-house here.

We also cut all of our own plastics

that are used in the game.

We print all our own artwork and decals

that make their way onto that plastic.

This one here has got off-cuts there.

That's a Fathom plastic set.

It comes in in raw material that we have the designs,

we cut them out on a laser cutter,

and they make their way up to the print room

to get art put on them.

We make all our own cabinets in-house.

We cut the wood on the CNC machine.

We glue them and assemble them.

We do all the prep work, which has got to do

with edging and hole filling,

putting leg bolt holes in, all those sorts of things,

into our own spray booth where we do all automotive,

two-pack spray painting on all our cabinets

before they make their way into final assembly

to get their decals and be matched up with their playfields.

This playfield would've come up here

as a bare piece of wood probably yesterday, late yesterday.

And this is sort of the progress it makes in a few hours.

Really we should be getting through a playfield in a day

to make its way back down to final assembly room

to get paired in with a cabinet.

Never, ever in a million years would I have thought

that one day I would actually be manufacturing

pinball machines for a living.

When I started this idea

that I was gonna make a pinball machine, I looked at,

you know, what were the big events in America.

The Texas Pinball Festival, which is held in March,

Mary or April pretty much every year

was about six months in the future.

So I thought, "I'm gonna get a whitewood

to Texas in six months."

I didn't have a theme to speak of per se,

and it was literally a sort of overnight,

you know, morning shower moment when I thought,

"Well, look, I can, I'll hark back to my roots.

And my mother being Scottish, you know,

we could make a pinball machine based on the Celts.

You gotta compete in the Highland Games."

In an eight-week, period I went from zero design

to a whitewood that was working in the garage at home.

I managed to organize the,

or person that was running basically

the Texas Pinball Festival,

he managed to organize a cabinet for me.

I pulled apart the pinball machine whitewood that I had,

put it in a couple of flight case boxes

that were about yea big,

put them in oversized luggage on the plane,

took my, checked in my two boxes worth of pinball parts,

and over two days leading up to the event,

I rebuilt that pinball machine

and then wheeled it out onto the floor to play.

- And how was it received?

- Well, unfortunately too well,

'cause I obviously considered when I came back,

"Well, okay, they didn't tell me it sucked.

So this must be, have an opportunity.

Let's go to the next step and keep going."

(dramatic bagpipe music)

- [Game Voice] Five, four,

three,

two,

one.

- It's unbelievably daunting and nerve-wracking because,

you know, you make a machine, you put it in a box,

you send it the other side of the world,

and then you're like, "Oh, yeah, okay,

they're gonna unpack it."

You know, "Is all the bits there?

Do we remember to put the leg bolts in?

Is it all gonna fit together?

Will it turn on when they flick the switch?"

That's always the first one.

You just sort of, will it actually turn on?

But you know, once they did,

and a lot of people were streaming games,

and when you watched them play it on live stream,

the games were just playing so beautifully well,

and that's really all thanks to the final testing process,

'cause we just dial it in so that it's actually enjoyable

straight outta the box.

You know, you'd have to call it

the next golden age of pinball, you know?

If you probably look at these periods in time

where people say this '80s period of Fathom

and then the early '90s of those DMD-era games,

and you know, I think most people

will look back on this period of these 2020s

or you know, late 20 teens, and I would have to say

herald it as the next golden era of pinball.

- Every day somebody comes into my arcade

and discovers pinball and discovers a reason

to get outta the house again.

- I think our gap of when arcades died

was like late '90s, early 2000s.

So there's almost a generation that came through

that didn't grow up playing these games,

didn't have that connection,

and now we're trying to jump that cultural chasm

and reconnect people with these again.

- Everyone has their favorite game.

They can share that game.

Everyone can come together and join in that community.

- I mean, there's nothing like doing it

in the companionship of mates in a venue.

- Over the years, as we become adults,

you sort of lost where you started from.

People forget about how much fun it was

just going out and just the pure joy

of seeing other people doing the same things you do.

'Cause there was no chat rooms.

You just had to physically meet somebody.

Then you just chat about it. Then you end up being mates.

Those sort of bonds, you can't just, you can't fake it.

You just, people just need to get back out

and just make those connections again.

- With mental health for socializing, to stop loneliness,

depression, anxiety, and all that's forgotten

when you're playing together,

when you're a part of something.

- My early life was not good.

Going out, going to the arcades was my sanctuary.

It was a safe place for me.

It was like, I had a very, very traumatic childhood,

and it was my safe place.

So this is my safe place, and I love it.

There was a time when I was,

just got sick of the pinballs as well,

when I was collecting and when I had like a big collection,

not as big as kind of what it is now,

but and I just had enough of everything,

just seriously had enough of everything.

So that was like almost the lowest point in my life.

I had wanted ads looking for games everywhere,

and then one day a man rings me, and he says,

"I've got a pinball machine I wanna get rid of."

And I says, "Look, sorry mate,

I've just had enough of pinballs and stuff,

and I've just had enough."

And then the guy said to me, "It's not,

you don't have to buy it, it's a gift."

And that gift turned my life around.

So that's what they mean to me.

(triumphant music)

(calm music)

Here we go.

(calm music continues)

It works.

(calm music continues)

- Three years ago, I stood in an old bowling alley

in Christies Beach wondering what might've become

of that Mortal Kombat II I played there as a kid,

and that one seemingly simple question

led me on an adventure I'll never forget.

I discovered an incredible community of people,

a long, fascinating history,

and jaw dropping collections and venues.

I never did find out what happened

to that one Mortal Kombat II cab, and I'm okay with that.

I believe it's still out there somewhere,

more so now than ever.

But what I did find was an amazing group

of selfless, hardworking, passionate, everyday people

that have dedicated their lives to preserving

and sharing those big old games that started it all.

So next time you step up to an old arcade or pinball

for a quick game, take a moment

to imagine the life it's had, the places it's been,

and the people who have kept it alive

so that it can be in front of you today, still standing.

♪ We are, we are, we are, we are good together ♪

♪ Together ♪

♪ We are, we are, we are, we are good together ♪

♪ Together ♪

♪ We're two hearts, we're two hearts ♪

♪ Seeing new heights ♪

♪ We're two wrongs, we're two wrongs ♪

♪ Feeling all right ♪

♪ We are, we are, we are, we are good together ♪

♪ Together ♪

♪ You're still spending all our cash ♪

♪ I've been begging you to try and save ♪

♪ I know you won't stop, credit card is maxed out anyways ♪

♪ I'm still drinking cheap beers ♪

♪ You've been begging me to exercise ♪

♪ You know I won't stop ♪

♪ My liver's performing in its prime ♪

♪ These bad habits are what make me ♪

♪ These bad habits are what make you, yeah ♪

♪ We are, we are, we are, we are good together ♪

♪ Together ♪

♪ We are, we are, we are, we are good together ♪

♪ Together ♪

♪ We're two hearts, we're two hearts ♪

♪ Seeing new heights ♪

♪ We're two wrongs, we're two wrongs ♪

♪ Feeling all right ♪

♪ We are, we are, we are, we are good together ♪

♪ Together ♪

♪ You're still biting your nails ♪

♪ I've been begging you to try and quit ♪

♪ Well, maybe I should shut my mouth ♪

♪ It makes no difference ♪

♪ We are, we are, we are, we are good together ♪

♪ Together ♪

♪ We are, we are, we are, we are good together ♪

♪ Together ♪

♪ We're two hearts, we're two hearts ♪

♪ Seeing new heights ♪

♪ We're two wrongs, we're two wrongs ♪

♪ Feeling all right ♪

♪ We are, we are, we are, we are good together ♪

♪ Together ♪