very nice!

Come visit Austin. Its a wonderful town

6th street is a good time

I'm not far at all from Austin, need to check that out.

Very nice. Nice to see an public arcade. Before FB we had to meet somewhere to be social. Now.....ugghh....

Eh... why is Heaven... so far out... can't reach...

image.jpg

really cool nice arcade!

Very nice place!

SMH... Makes no sense on how beautiful that place looks.

Sheesh! Good thing that place isn't closer to meeee! I'd never get anything done!

Has anyone played that voyager game? Is it any good?

curious to know how much profit this place makes, if any. tough business. really nice machines though.

Man, I really hope they do well...or are millionaires that can just drop cash 'just for fun'. SS Billiards for example, excellent games, excellent owner, unfortunately not that great of business right now. I drop by when I can to drop some coin, my goal is 20 bucks (and that's pretty easy, since I generally suck at pinball ). But rent is rent, and that looks like a high rent place.

That is just awesome!! Ok, who want's to start an arcade after reading this??

I read the story. I bet they make pretty good money doing that many private parties a weekend.

And what pray tell happens on 6th street? Hmmmmmmm?

Looking forward to my Austin trip this month. Definitely Pinballz and, and, 6th street?

That is one sweet looking arcade

I think most owners do it to share and meet other pin people. Maybe the cash helps pay some bills but I doubt they make anything worth while. To have a lists titles on the floor tells me they do it for the love of pinball and they usually have money from something else.

This place is heaven. Me and a buddy get to hit it up every month or so. This place has everything and they keep the machines in good condition. If you do visit, the only thing you need to worry about is having enough time. Last time I was in they had most games set at 50 and 75 cents a play. What I love about this place is that plenty of people are there playing and ages range from child to senior. It just gives hope to pinball.

More pics of "heaven" here... ( and no, it's not a porn link either! Get your minds out of the trough! )

http://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/pinballz-a-visual-guide-by-nimblepin

Yeah I thought this was the same place NimblePin visited

Ball trough... hehe...

Pinballz is very nice... I drove all the way there from LR just to shop for my next pin.
The owner came out to greet me as he.. first time ever to play ST 25, TOTAN, SM, MM, MB, Tommy.. and several old video arcades.. it's full of machines.. most in pretty good shape..

Definitely check it and Austin out if you get a chance..

When many of us collectors first got into pinball, we'd stop at Lloyds mostly to try out various games we may be interested in buying. It was also a central point for many of us to meet. Fast forward to today and it's mostly the same games month after month. There's even fewer games now.

I know it's impossible for Lloyd to do, but throw in food and alcohol and it would give us another reason to go. Otherwise, we have a bigger variety and nicer games in our own basements....where we have food and alcohol.

This seems to be one way to still make money at coin op. The operator we bought the 22 pins from last New Years, was getting rid of most of their locations and concentrating on the fun center they had in Cheyenne WY. Most of the money was made having birthday and other types of parties.

The only difference is, they had no desire to include pinballs. They were simply too much work for the money they made.

Let us not forget the attrition of those collectors who first got into pinball.

They come in, play games. They come in play games and ask questions.They buy their first pin. They come in need help and parts.

Wash - rinse - repeat.

Soon they have a collection, meet other collectors. Then start meeting in each others homes. Visit with collector friends, food, drinks, play some pinball.

They really weren't into the arcade experience to begin with. And once got into the pinball social network, they are done playing on location.

I only hear from them now when they can't fix something or need a part in a hurry.

LTG

P.S. Food - there is a great deli nearby and you can bring in food. I provide the cheeseburgers and fries for the Crazy Joe from there. And alcohol isn't the answer to getting in players. Ignoring if I could actually do it or have the money to set it up and run it. I've seen too many places with alcohol close. City Billiards is a prime example, open 12 years in down town Minneapolis in the warehouse district. They had liquor and went under. And for a start alcohol would wipe out any customers under 21 from coming in.

Thanks for posting, just forwarded the link to a friend who's heading to Austin in a couple weeks.

I was in heaven for 2 hours last night after work playing some TS. What an awesome game!

WOW...

Thanks for posting the link very cool!

The worst part about living next to Pinballz is that I can't stay on any single game long enough to really feel satisfied when I leave. Whereas on location at bars or what have you, the options are limited and you end up on a single table for awhile with some crap games until you start getting a feel and hitting replays. With so many options, after a couple bad games I end up walking away and trying something else. In the end I just feel like I suck at pinball (which I very likely do) and drive home frustrated.

A blessing and a curse for a short attention span like mine! Definitely have gotten to play some awesome games that I probably would have never played otherwise and will likely not play anywhere again.

Also, I am cheap and prefer 3 games for a buck to 75c per. I can drop $20 in an hour, easy. I guess I am spoiled with a relative abundance of on location games and Pinballz to boot!

pretty pissed i was in austin and didnt know about this place until 6 months later....WILL go next time i am there, but damn.

Hah I work at pinballz, im there everyday and i still only play the same handful of games over and over. FT, SM, tron, SM, LOTR, then back to fish tales. Gotta have that tunnel vision.

If anybody has questions requests or gripes post.here and i can reply.tonight

I’ve always thought for anyone new to really have a chance you have to bring something new to the table (obviously), and you have to be able to appeal to corporate functions/other parties, as with all the BS team building crap every company tries to push on their staff these days, this type of activity is a shoe in. Not to mention they mostly happen through the week, and don’t take away from non work parties that would likely consume weekend time.

I have had three separate parties alone at my place for work functions related to this, and not even for my work.

I think it would be fun to have people register there high score initials. Then pinballz could periodically wipe the scores on all the games and give whoever has the most high scores a small prize of some sort. Snailman doesn't need more free tokens and swag but, I think it would be fun.

Oh and the lock on the Shadow is messed up. Thanks for being so awesome

Nice! I wish we had somthing like that in my home town.

Great place and I really can't gripe but I really wish you would at least sell at market value retail prices. I want to support local so bad but paying twice market just kills it. I know your business isn't really sales but since you offer them for sale that's the only feedback for growth I can offer.

holy shit .. are you freakin kidding me .. lucky guys .

If you are showing me a picture of my new gameroom and it was all paid for in cash. There is an even better house, pool out back not pictured. Family is happy and healthy and bank account is even happier.

Then yeah pobably heaven at least to me.

Looks like fun.
There should be a large hotel across the street.

This is a good idea, maybe the thing to do would be have a 'drawing' a few times a year where we randomly draw the name of a game, and if the grand champ initials are in our database they get the prize.

That way someone with 30 grand champ scores would have 30 chances to win instead of winning outright, and having one GC score would still give you a_ chance. We could do multiple drawings at once and if you've won one prize already we just re-draw. If it's just who has the most, then yeah, it's probably gonna be COL or ZAC every time.

The owner Darren is a good guy and a collector himself, if you like the pin but not the price you can make him an offer through the ebay store or website or introduce yourself at one of the holiday parties.

It really is a great place and you can't go wrong with BYOB....... I've been once and I can't wait to go back.

Chris

Agreed. He's a great guy for sure and I've had a lot of good times shooting the breeze with him. I did that and just couldn't come close though. Maybe I was just unrealistic but I was offering $3K for the routed Corvette which seemed to be overpaying as it's in good but not great shape) but I wanted to support local so much I offered anyway, but the best I could get was $4K

Again, not really complaining as you can sell for what you want and I do see some of them selling every now and then but since feedback was requested I wanted to offer this. In the grand scheme of things I would love to buy and sell all of my pins through Pinballz to help do my part to help keep our local business open and this great place open but I just can't justify paying almsot twice the value.

Your drawing idea for grand champions is great. Run with that!