Summer 2009.
I had recently been to my first pinball show and was determined to get myself a machine. I was in the process of moving house, so i made sure that I found somewhere to live that had enough room to set up a game first.
I made a good choice in choosing Fish Tales as my first game. One turned up on Ebay near to me for £600 BIN, but I had never played one before. There was one located in a Laser Quest arcade in a nearby town, so I went in and had a few games on it to try it out. I was probably double the age of everyone else there, but I was impressed with the game and decided to go ahead and buy the one on Ebay.
I asked my then boss at work for a favour, and he helped me pick the game up in his 4X4. It turned out to be owned by a lady in the Armed Forces who had brought the game back from Germany. It was missing the topper, but in my ignorance at the time I wasn't too bothered about that. It had the usual faded cabinet as well.
We got the game home and set it up. Of course there were several things wrong with it, the fish reel wouldn't work properly and there were lots of lamps out and switches not working. I found who the UK parts suppliers were, and ordered up the required parts. I'm a maintenance electrician by trade so I was confident to do minor work on the game. A bridge rectifier then decided to short out, but being new to the hobby I took the board to a repairer for him to fix. That's something that I'd now be confident to fix myself.
While I was waiting for the Power Driver Board to be fixed, I bought my second machine, a Silverball Mania. The disease had now taken hold!