Escondido, CA
I grew up in Maine in the mid 1960's to mid 70's and there was a pinball machine in every pizza restuarant, and I ate at everyone of them, and played every game as well. The local bowling alley had 4-6 pinball machines and on a Friday night there was usually a crowd of people standing on each side of the machines. There was plenty of room between the machines-unlike the arcades now with just a few inches between the machines. Some were there to cheer you on, and others were hoping for your game to end so they could play.
In the summer of 1973 I moved to San Diego and started my Junior year in High School. I made some close friends on our street , none of us drove, so we did a lot of walking. One of our favorite walks was to a pizza place with one baseball themed EM pinball machine.
I am not quite sure how we discovered this, but we found that if you hit the coin door with your palm right at the small red start button- the game would reset and not remove any of your credits. Needless to say, this was not appreciated by the manager of the store. We got away with it as much as we could, and managed to have a few bits of pizza between games.
Soon arcade games such as Space Invaders and Asteroids were the norm, but I always gravitated to the pinball machines. With the leap to solid state machines, more sensory imput with music and speech made the the games even more fun to play. I wish I had a quarter for every quarter gladly put into these crazy machines.
When my daughters were old enough to go to the arcades, they would always be out of money first . They had played the games, rode the rides, and had redeemed their tickets for their prizes.They always knew where to find me ... planted in front of a machine playing pinball.Their fun was over and all they wanted was to leave. Whether the credits were there from coins added or replays , it was always was fun to give them away to someone .
