My NOOB story of EM love...
And thus why prices are going up, maybe...
I'm 54 and grew up going to the bowling alleys with my bowlover parents in the 70s. Being younger, and the balls at the alley being horrible, I found bowling unappetizing for gaming and entertainment and would run into the game room to play pinball. EM pinballs were fascinating to me as a kid from circa 1973-1978. There was a vendor that rotated the machines, and I remember the oldest being BEAT TIME, which was still rotating in the mid-70s. My first love was KING KOOL. Naturally the Ballys were striking to look at, but not my thing, and the Williams machines with pointy people weren't quite so enthusing. I really dug those Krynski-Morison Gottliebs with the longer flippers than the 60s pins: the art was COOL and reminiscent of Marvel comics at the time, recalling Buscema and Kirby and there was a lot of Ed Wood thrown in as well. The sounds, the lights, the play, the strategies, etc... and there were always these "cool guys" and stylish 70s people back there playing, their girlfriends always quite striking. It was a whole scene in the game room prior to video games. Circa 1976-7 I had the money to buy a machine and was trying to get myself on one, but my dad pin-blocked me.
Our main alley nearby burned up one night in October 1978 and the games with it. Never to return. I would play one here and there in Holiday Inns or 7-elevens or even in video arcades. However, my young mind was enthralled by video games from 1978 onward, and I soon forgot the love of EM pinball....
40 years later, I recollected that joy of EMs. Found this site and others and researched the games I used to play. Finally, this past week, I decided to reconnect to my past and buy one. So I just purchased a nicely restored OUT OF SIGHT to begin my collection. The wife is sweating bricks and bullets.
Depending on how life goes, I would love to collect a bunch of 70s EM Gottliebs to preserve them and improve them. There is something admirable about the complexity and primal engineering, the art and craft, of those machines. Naturally they were part of my formative years, but I would assume they grab younger people as well at some point and foster similar admiration, despite some disappointment over the simplicity of the playfields compared to the modern machines.