I used to enjoy playing the old electro-mechanical pinball machines in the seaside arcades when I was a kid back in the sixties, as you could make your pocket money last longer that way rather than feeding the fruit machines...
Then as a teenager I frequently played the first solid state machines such as Gorgar, Black Knight, and Silverball Mania during the late seventies in pub gamesrooms before I was able to buy a pint of beer.
I sadly lost interest in pinball once I got married during the mid eighties, and so was oblivious to the developments that were taking place in machines through to the present day.
I rediscovered pinball again in the summer of 2009 after discovering that now you could now actually buy a real full sized pinball machine to play at home bought from places like ebay. I then ended up going to the UK pinball show at Northampton and had the time of my life trying out all the machines there. I left with a big grin, and a mission to purchase a pinball machine of my very own... It took just a couple of weeks until I picked up my first machine - Fish Tales.
Well as it is always said in the hobby, you can never stop at just having one machine, I have been through over thirty pins in my collection.
