Just finished playing my Twilight Zone on its 25th birthday - crazy to think this machine came out a quarter century ago!

I used to play TZ almost every day in high school when it was new at the local arcade, and after that also anytime I’d find one. Over the years, there were less and less of them around, and they were in worse and worse shape.

Eventually there was just one left in the city at the campus arcade in such badly maintained condition that it could barely spit the ball back out of the slot machine. The clock was broken. Bridge diverter on the right ramp was missing...you could really even play the thing. This was about 10 years ago, and pinball was pretty much dead at that time. Around here it was, anyways, and probably a lot of other places too.

I figured if I ever wanted to play this game again in the future, I’d have to buy one since there were just going to be less and less of them out there in worse and worse condition, so I posted an ad and bought one a few hours from me in decent shape. Everything worked, minor wear, and a bit of very minimal planking.. not bad!

That was 9 years ago, and I’ve kept it ticking along smoothly ever since, learning how to maintain it and repair it. Just rebuilt the entire bridge diverter mechanism on this one about a month ago since it was getting sloppy and worn out. Has incandescent #545 bulbs in the backbox. All stock with no mods, which is how I prefer it. And over the last while I’ve bought a new playfield, new plastics, and am just about finished gathering new replacements for all the parts and mechs that are showing their age in preparation for a restoration.

It still works great at 25 years, and after I bring it back to brand new condition, it might even outlast me, more or less, with just home use. At any rate, it’ll still look a lot better in another 25 years than I’d have imagined a machine could be when I was playing that last busted out routed machine ten years ago that caused me to enter this hobby.

Happy birthday, to my Twilight Zone!

And pinball on location actually came back from that near-death! Which if I’d known that was gonna happen would have saved me a lot of time and money, but then I wouldn’t have the pleasure of tinkering with this machine to keep it in shape.

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Yeah, it’s crazy.. a quarter century!

This is the title that really hooked me into pinball. A friend and I would go over lunch hour to a different arcade at the nearby mall at first where we got into DE’s Phantom of the Opera and Taxi initially, then that arcade at the mall was replaced by another bigger one (the days of anything like a new arcade at the mall are sure long gone) and they had a Funhouse machine.. which I thought was such a fun/creepy/cool game.

Then an arcade opened up across the street from the high school (smart business decision) and usually had four pinball machines. The core lineup was Twilight Zone, Addams Family, CFTBL, and then another would rotate in/out - Popeye, Bad Cats, etc. I’d play them all, but my friend and I would play TZ the most and we could play the thing most of the evening on 3 games/$1, just hitting replays. So much fun!

Got to know the operator of that arcade and would help out occassionally doing minor maintenance and stuff which got me shortly thereafter into collecting vids (which is much cheaper when you’re younger) and eventually pinball machines. And now here it is 25 years later and I’m still into it.

Funny thing: there’s a pinball place here that opened here a year or so ago, and a few weeks back I went to check it out finally with my gf. I ran into the same guy I played pinball with at that high school arcade there (who I hadn’t seen in a decade or more, and was there for the second time ever himself) as well as another guy who was around that arcade that we’d have hung around with. So mid-afternoon on a Sunday with 5-6 other people in the place, two of them were from that high school arcade.

As we’re leaving a bit later my gf says, “who were those two guys in there you were talking to?” And I say, “oh, yeah, it was the same people I saw last time I went to the arcade, like, 20 years ago”..

Really bizarre