Just my $.02...

It might be the golden age to some people, but only because they don't have any context. OK...how many arcades are there in your town today? When's the last time you saw a pinball machine in a laundromat? A 7-11? A gas station? A barbershop? A roller rink? The American Legion hall? The drive-in (the movie kind and the burger kind)? Oh...in a newsstand? The bus station in my town always had two or three games, the Greyhound and the Trailways. Movie theater? They were EVERYWHERE.

If you go to your local high school on Monday and ask the first boy you saw "Where's the closest place to play pinball?" He would have no clue.

Three, five-ball games for a quarter was my pricing. I made $1.75 an hour bagging groceries, so I could play 21 games, 105 balls, for an hour's pay. At $8 an hour today at a McD's, you can MAYBE play 8 games, 24 balls, for an hour's pay.

A wedgehead sold new for $350 or so in the 60's. I could have bought one for 200 hours of work. Today, the McD's kid would have to work 750 hours to by a $6,000 Stern.

I don't know how many games Stern makes a year, but I do know that Gottlieb made 13,000 Jack in the Box/Jumpin Jacks in 1973. THAT was "golden".

Relatively speaking, pinball is extinct today, and out of reach for the average person.

I don't know the diff between collectors and hobbyists, but collecting in the 70's and 80's...especially the 80's was a lot better than it is today. Games were cheap. I had 20-30 games....mostly EM's by 1984 and I can't recall ever paying more than $300 for one. There were tons of EM's and Bally SS games available because vids drove them out of locations fast. And, the condition of games was FAR better than it is today...things are pretty well picked over.

One thing that is significantly different in collecting now is the availability of parts. While there were a large number of NOS playfields were available then....I once bought 200 NOS Gottlieb playfields in one deal...but no one ever thought that playfields would ever be reproduced. Same thing with plastics. It was a huge deal when repro legs became available. Pop bumper caps were the ones that come with your game; I personally bought games so I could get the plastics or bumper caps for a better example of the game.

70s and 80s for collectors. Video games drove pins off location in droves, and when they were driven out, they were young and low mileage. So games were widely available, and very cheap by any standard. You just didn't go look for, say, a C37 or Joker Poker and grab the first one you saw, you looked at a dozen or two until you found the one in great condition. And most major cities had at least a couple of game auctions a year, with hundreds of pins for sale at each one. And then....the internet came along a effed everything up.

Today is a golden age for collectors in only one aspect: you can pretty much buy the parts to build a whole game. In the 70's and 80's, you could even buy a leg.